


Strangeness and Charm

by FeelsForBreakfast



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 8th year, M/M, POV Third Person Omniscient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 20:13:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 45,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4974925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeelsForBreakfast/pseuds/FeelsForBreakfast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One November night during his eighth year at Hogwarts, Draco ends up in the forbidden forest. That’s how it starts. </p><p>or: If two boys fall in love in a magical forest, does it still make a sound?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangeness and Charm

**Author's Note:**

> Big thank you to Allie alpha-exodus who gave this is reliably speedy and SUPER helpful beta !!! Thank u for always being a homie and coming thru <3 <3 also big enormous thank u to Emily girlionceknew for your read throughs and for always letting me complain about this story and how ridiculous it is. You are great !!!! <3 
> 
> Content warnings: there’s a rather unpleasant suicide conversation in the vein of ‘insensitive boys trying to hurt each other’s feelings on purpose’ also there are probably some consent problems with fucking a mirage of your enemy who is actually your enemy who also thinks they’re fucking your mirage but would fuck the real you, if it were an option, which is isn’t, kind of. It’s complicated.

Very few things are known about the Forbidden Forest. From above, the forest measures approximately ten by thirteen miles, however, no one in recorded history has ever walked from one side to the other. The flora and fauna of the Forbidden Forest remain largely undocumented for a variety of reasons. 1. The forest possesses multiple climate zones and swiftly changing seasons. 2. Many plants present in the depths of the Forbidden Forest are documented nowhere else in the world and seem to resist both name and categorization on a primal level. 3.Those who attempt to document the secrets of the forest find themselves with wiped muggle technology and blank sheets of paper, wandering out years later with only a vague feeling of unease. It is better, most likely, just to observe such a strange, savage thing. Or, better yet, to stay far away from this wild magic altogether.

Of course, sometimes the forest calls out to us, with the rustle of leaves in the night, vines sneaking through the cracks of windows, and alien bird calls in the early morning. Sometimes it’s impossible to resist.

xx

Harry sat at the Gryffindor table in an early morning stupor the first week of school. Beside him, Hermione was chattering to Ron and Neville about something he’d long lost the thread of, but that seemed to be of pressing importance to her. Harry had a headache. Harry was very, incredibly tired.

“You there, Harry?” Harry heard, just in the periphery of his consciousness. Blinking himself back to lucidity, he tried to refocus on Hermione’s face.

“Sorry,” he mumbled inadequately, stabbing at his eggs and toast. “Tired.”

Hermione’s gaze went both gentle and sharp at the same time. “You’re still not sleeping?” It was sympathetic but somehow disbelieving, like he should have been better by then, like his healing could be as meticulously scheduled and color coded as her life. Highlighted in blue, two months in: ‘can sleep through the night.’ Highlighted in pink, three months in: ‘doesn’t say weird things about the war anymore.’ Highlighted in yellow, four months in: ‘is Harry in the way we expect him to be.’

“Nope, can’t get my head to be quiet,” he replied, swirling his pumpkin juice in his glass. He needed to stop zoning out, so they’d stop having this conversation. He gave her his best smile and felt something in him exhale in relief when she took his hand in hers.

“I just wish they’d up your dose of dreamless sleep,” Hermione said irritably, a furrow in her brow.

“So I can end up in a coma?” Harry asked wryly, remembering how the healer had frowned when Harry had told her he still wasn’t sleeping, that it wasn’t enough, that his body had gotten used to it again.

She frowned. “I just think that as professional healers they should have some alternative treatment. It’s horrible that they can’t fix it.” Harry knew for a fact that she often went to the library and researched sleeping potions for him and that nothing she tried worked, at least not for long.

“Potions aren’t miracles,” Ron said around a mouthful of mash. “No offense, Harry.”

“None taken,” Harry said, raising his glass in a mock toast. Harry could have used a miracle, or a few extra years between himself and everything that had happened. He thought he might be getting better, but he wasn’t entirely sure what being better would mean. He didn’t think that he’d ever be without scars.

“Have you been doing the mindfulness exercises Lav and I told you about?” Parvati asked from across the table, sloppily buttering a piece of toast. Harry gave her a guilty look and she sighed deeply at him. “It really helped me a lot. It calms the mind.”

“Not really sure I like the idea of being locked in my own head, honestly,” Harry replied, and she gave a little shrug.

“It’s not getting locked in your head,” she said, not for the first time. “If you do ever change your mind you can meditate with us,” she gave him a final little smile before turning back to Lavender.

Harry scanned the Great Hall slowly, finding the empty places at all the benches like he sometimes did during breakfast, when he was too tired to stop himself from doing it. As he was examining the places where old friends had once sat, his eyes fell on the Slytherin table all the way on the other side.

Harry had been surprised at how many of the Slytherins in his year had decided to come back, but there they were, crowded at the edge of the table in what appeared to be companionable silence. He supposed that like him, they’d found themselves with no sense of where they were supposed to be and so like him, they’d wandered back to the only place that had wanted them back.

Across the hall, Draco caught Harry’s roving eyes and stared at him through a small window of space between a Hufflepuff’s head and a tureen of applesauce on the Ravenclaw table. Draco still wasn’t sure if it was wise to hold Harry’s gaze when it drifted over to him, but he always found himself holding it, wise or not. He thought that Harry always looked the saddest in the mornings and that he almost definitely didn’t sleep, which Draco understood.

Draco slept fitfully in the months after the Dark Lord’s death. He would sleep when he found himself in bed, always through the night, but he never felt rested, never escaped from that thin lip of sleep haunted by snakes and callous laughter. He woke every morning to an aching body and the taste of venom thick in his mouth.

Harry’s eyes reminded him a little bit of shifty snake eyes, all glassy and nervous when they moved. They also reminded him of the color of new leaves, like the soupy water that gathers on the edges of ponds.

Draco was too tired to be entertaining thoughts of Potter’s eyes. The truth was that when his life began to tear at the seams he’d begun to hide from going to bed like a child. He’d wander and moan and hide from the bad dreams like if he didn’t go to sleep they wouldn’t come for him. It was in this way during the late fall of their eighth year that he discovered the Forbidden Forest. Or, alone in the night, allowed it to discover him.

Two months after school had started - after Harry meeting Draco’s eyes over the tables became a habit instead of just a coincidence - Draco wandered the halls at night for the first time, and that was how the discovering began.

He wasn’t afraid of the night. He was only a little afraid of the things in it. Draco was afraid of himself, but only a little.

Draco thought that the castle walls seemed a bit tired in the aftermath of the war, even after the rebuilding. It turned out that he was right about the castle walls, and they were grateful that he’d thought of them, so they ushered him through the corridors as he wandered at night and kept him safe from harm. Sometimes the staircases, who cared for the sad boy the most, would take him to corridors they didn’t normally stretch to, or hold him on their steps as he sat and thought.

The castle was the first one to give him a quiet push towards the forest, because it knew that he was thorny and tangled inside. The castle, on one night in early November, opened the doors of the Great Hall wide, pushing Draco Malfoy out into the night so he could hear the soft humming of the forest.

The forest, for her part, loved Draco Malfoy too. The forest loved him as it loved the centaurs and unicorns and the dark things in its deeps. The forest loved him with a ferocious and untidy passion from the moment he stepped inside, older than he had been during his first visit, more broken, more wise.

The forest remembered the way he had been and she missed his arrogance in the face of her winding branches, because she thought he had been so funny, so stubbornly prideful in the face of his own cruelty and terror. She was also cruel and adored with the same destruction he did, and so she loved him.

When Draco stepped into the forest, he felt nothing but a hot gust of air that swept up into his cloak and through his hair like it was greeting him and feeling him out. It was already too far into night for the forest to be illuminated by anything but starlight, and he lit the tip of wand and realized he didn’t feel afraid.

Draco remembered being eleven and so terribly scared, felt the ghost of that fear hover at his shoulder and take haughty little breaths. He felt like telling it off as he trampled through the undergrowth and followed the winding, broken paths, but he soon became used to its presence behind him and didn’t mind so much. It was nice to have any company in the forest.

The first night he visited, Draco found nothing between the trees but more trees. When he looked up, he saw the shy flickering of stars above the branches, before the forest became too thick to let the sky through. Draco was good at noticing things, and he noticed as much as he could as he took the paths through the dark deep.

His mother had always taught him to be observant, told him in dulcet tones over cups of tea and glasses of red wine that it always paid to pay attention.

Although Draco didn’t see any animals in the forest, an irregular rustling followed him in the undergrowth and he felt a mumbling sort of sentience beyond even that. The forest smelled like fruit left in the sun, like sweat, like the slow turning of the seasons, like cutting something open for the first time.

Draco wandered the woods until his feet began to ache and as soon as he thought the words, the forest spit him back out onto Hogwarts grounds, yawning and slumped as he trekked back to his dormitory and fell into a thick, dreamless sleep.

Harry found no such sleep that night, because the forest hadn’t called to him yet. Harry lay in his bed until the morning hours, picking at the skin on the edges of his fingernails until they bled the scarlet of his bedspread.

He hadn’t picked at his fingernails until he’d needed something to do with his hands, and he hadn’t needed something to do with his hands until they’d started shaking without any conceivable explanation.

Regarding things without explanations, Harry couldn’t figure out why the morning after that particular sleepless night, Draco Malfoy looked less tired than he usually did. It was almost annoying, the way he didn’t look like he was going to keel over into the buffet, because Harry felt like he was going to keel over into the buffet and that just wasn’t fair at all.

“Malfoy looks well rested,” he grumbled, taking a surly swig of coffee.

“What a git,” Ron agreed, even as he exchanged an eye-roll with Neville, who had become alarmingly used to Harry’s Malfoy updates. “Still looks pissy though. You might beat him for overall mood, he always looks like he’s stepped in something terrible.”

“I think that’s just his face,” Neville suggested, his hair flopping into his eyes.

“Do you think?” Harry asked, sneaking another glance and meeting gray eyes. The bags under Draco’s eyes were much less pronounced than normal and his hair was artfully arranged like he’d actually put some effort into it. Harry was used to the way it stuck up in the mornings and he was a little irritated that Draco’d had the audacity to style it. “He looks fucking serene. I could just hex him.”

Ron snorted. “Not your best idea, mate.”

“Maybe I’ll ask Hermione to punch him for me,” Harry mumbled into his coffee, sending a glare across the Great Hall.

Draco noticed the glare and Harry’s annoyance from three tables away. Any amusement he might have once drawn from Harry’s dour mood was overshadowed by how accustomed he’d become to meeting Harry’s sleep heavy eyes from across the table. In retrospect, he felt that something about those glances had conveyed empathy.

Next to him, Blaise and Pansy were playing rock paper scissors over something stupid, Greg was spilling orange juice on the table cloth, and Theo was drawing on his plate with an egg yolk. Draco reached across to add a garnish to Theo’s drawing and felt that despite everything, they’d experienced an unexpectedly domestic fall from grace.

Wandering the castle that night, Draco thought it was inconvenient that despite the facade of normalcy, his body didn’t seem to want to heal. The only thing worse than his father’s suicide was the way Draco’s body refused to work as it should, resisting sleep and food and revolting against his efforts to breathe normally. It was as if Lucius had poisoned him too. Sometimes he still felt himself breathe like a swimmer coming up for air without any reason for doing it, and Pansy would sweetly tell him to stop hyperventilating, darling, please.

As he stepped into the forest for the second time he realized that the forest didn’t breathe like he did, too fast and skipping like a rock on the water. The forest took breaths that lasted hours, so smooth and subtle they were almost unnoticeable.

Draco wouldn’t have noticed the way the forest breathed at all if he hadn’t stopped with heavy feet to press his hands against the side of a log and felt the slight tremor of an exhale slip up to his fingers.

The forest tried to breathe as hard as it could, let the air shake its roots and tremble the tops of the trees so Draco could feel it, because the forest was worried for him and wanted him to breathe more slowly, to let his heartbeat calm.

He tried so hard to steady his breath, took even steps on the winding paths and tried to find peace, find healing. As he walked, small branches reached out to touch him, shy at first as they crawled towards his feet, and then more bold, curling up to his wrists and stroking through his hair.

The shadow of fear on his shoulder quivered at the touches but Draco kept his head up and let the vines pass through his fingers. He felt from the forest a pervasive good will, a quiet promise that she was going to protect him. He couldn’t explain why he was so certain, except that he was not the wrongest thing in the forest and that alone was comforting.

The forest liked the soft light Draco held in his chest that Madame Pomfrey would have called his heart. She liked the way it flicked and sputtered and went speeding far too fast, and how he seemed not to know what to do with it. The forest recognized many of the things inside: Pansy, who she’d seen on her edges many years ago, Crabbe and Goyle, who were tangled even half in death, Narcissa, whose love cast a protective glow over it, and - just left of center, wrapped in thick cords of light and secrets - Harry, which didn’t surprise the forest much.

It would have surprised Draco and it certainly would have surprised Harry, but he was in his bed unasleep and didn’t yet know.

Sleep came easier to Draco after he found the forest, and all of the Slytherins noticed but none of them knew why, because Draco was good at secrets and tight smiles.

“You look better,” Pansy said to him three days after his first trip to the forest, as they did homework in the common room after lunch. It was innocuous, or meant to sound that way, but Draco could see curiosity nearly bursting out of her at the prospect of a secret.

“I’ve been taking walks at night,” Draco said, doodling in the side margin of his potions textbook. “It makes me feel more centered, makes it easier to get to bed.” Not a lie, not the truth either. He thought if Pansy was meant to know about the forest she would. It was that sort of thing.

“Just walks?” she pressed, pausing her work to give him a look. She had a way of raising her eyebrows that made her almond shaped eyes look incredibly foreboding, like they were made of flint and had just caught alight.

“Truly, just walks,” Draco replies, trying to level his glare. The number of intense eye-conversations in his life were beginning to become emotionally taxing. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting better.”

She softened, lips curling into something sweet, honey soft like when she used to baby him. “You think?”

“Hard to tell.” He watched her, setting his homework down with a sigh and patting the couch next to him. He remembered sixth year when she barely left his bed because both of them were too afraid to face anything, because they felt safer when they weren’t alone. They never talked about anything that was happening because he knew they felt differently, but the closeness always helped.

She scampered across the rug and dumped herself next to him, cuddling against his chest with a happy little noise. “It’s all okay now,” she said absently, as they both returned to their books.

“I know,” Draco replied, even though not everything was for him, because she needed to say things like that just like he needed the forest.

That night, the forest waited for him with eagerly waving branches and trembling fronds because she had something special for him. She knew she’d have to move slowly, because Draco was fragile like her butterflies, but she wanted to give him this one thing.

The castle agreed, perhaps for a different reason than the forest did, because while the castle loved Draco Malfoy, the castle also loved Harry Potter with a sharp, mothering passion. The castle felt in her heart that Harry loved her in a way few others did, because she was the first home he’d ever had and they both knew it. The castle knew what most of the students kept in the gilt boxes behind their ribs, and she knew that Harry kept some of her in his, which flattered her greatly.

The castle also knew that Harry kept, in a dusty, un-examined corner, a pair of gray eyes. The castle was fairly sure he hadn’t meant to put them in there, that they’d crept in from the brain or the sternum and gotten stuck, but they were in there all the same.

And so the castle urged Harry from his bed that night with that peculiar pull she often had, because she knew Harry couldn’t resist a wander. Harry wrapped himself in his invisibility cloak without completely knowing why, crept through the corridors and out the doors towards the forest only because he knew it was better than not sleeping.

The forest welcomed him back in when he appeared at her edge, the sharp swell of his magic reminding her of the history he’d left in her depths, both blood and youth and the sticky scent of fear.

When Harry entered the forest he was greeted by a low whistling of leaves in the breeze and a pleased feeling that grew in his gut but didn’t seem to be entirely his own. He lit his wand so he could see, trepidatious at being so close to the place where he’d once died, where he’d seen Voldemort that night, awful and covered in another’s blood.

The forest felt his fear and resisted the urge to comfort him in case she scared him off, only blowing towards him warm air and the softest earth smell she had, keeping her vines to herself.

She walked them around each other, Draco and Harry on circular paths that never crossed but brushed close. She fancied that they could sense each other.

Draco did feel something new in the winding forest paths that night but he couldn’t fathom what it was, could only follow the trails and run his fingers across the vines. He had the vague sense that the forest was brimming with something, maybe life and maybe love, and that she was just waiting to upend her secrets upon him.

Quietly, without pretense, a soft rustling announced to him the presence of first one tiny snake, and then a few more. Draco clutched his wand more tightly and watched them slither closer to him, wide glassy eyes staring up at him in the dark.

“I’m a bit afraid of you,” he said to them, crafting it like an apology. “It’s a secret. Slytherins shouldn’t be afraid of snakes.”

The snakes dipped and wove a little like they were telling him they understood. There were seven little snakes in front of him, all various shades of gray and green like they were made from rock instead of snake.

“You’re not as bad as Nagini,” he said, suppressing a shiver. “Don’t take that the wrong way, I think you’re beautiful but I never know what you’re going to do.” Oddly, he thought that why was why snakes made them such a good mascot, because they both had the same shifty eyes. It made sense, he was a snake, he was afraid of snakes, nothing there was out of the pattern.

The snakes bobbed their heads at him, flicking tiny tongues as he crouched down to their eye level, feeling his breath pick up without his permission. Pansy’s voice echoed soft in his head: “don’t hyperventilate darling, please.”

The snake in the middle crept slowly forward, and Draco knew that it was going to, even before it did. He could feel its intentions before he saw them and didn’t feel quite as afraid. There was a lesson there, about confronting fears, about how the things Draco was afraid of were snakes and were also more than snakes.

Draco held his hand out and knew the snake would curl around it, hard scaly body sliding against his skin, tender like a caress.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s much easier when I can understand you.”

The snake let out a little hiss which Draco felt as a low _me too_ and he smiled, letting the snake curl around his wrist like a bracelet. He left it wrapped there as he made slow, steady progress through the forest, then made slow steady progress out of the forest and back up to bed, the serpent slipping from his wrist and back into the underbrush in a moment of distraction.

Harry crept from the forest with a sleep heavy head, following Draco just far enough behind for them not to meet. Harry remembered how to sleep again and it was the moment he woke up the next morning, blinking back undisturbed rest, that he knew he’d return to the forest for as long as he had to.

xx

The Forbidden Forest, located on the edge of the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has long been a source of much magical curiosity and inquiry. However, while the Forbidden Forest has garnered much fame given its proximity to the school, there are other areas of the world that elicit the same hushed speculation. Areas of the Amazon rainforest seem to have similar sentient powers and magical abilities, as does a large swath of the Pacific Ocean, forests in upper Canada, areas of the Gobi Desert, and the entire island of Vieques.

\- Magic of the Old World, Cassandra Sprat

xx

“Pansy says you’re sleeping better,” Blaise mentioned to Draco as they walked to class the following morning, his dark eyes curious. Blaise had an ear for gossip just as dangerous as Pansy’s, even more so because he kept things to himself until they became interesting.

“Glad to know my sleeping habits are the gossip of the whole house,” Draco replied, trying to keep up with Blaise’s clipped steps. “You’d think you guys would have something better to talk about.”

“Well it’s not exactly like you ever dropped the subject,” Blaise replied, pursing his lips. “You’ve complained about nothing else since the beginning of school.”

“You’re so insensitive,” Draco said with a scowl. “You used to care about my complaining.”

“You’re just not as menacing as you used to be, I suppose,” Blaise said, a teasing smile tugging on the edge of his lips.

Draco shoved him into the nearest suit of armor, barely giving the other boy time to catch himself. “Oh fuck off.”

“I feel like I just got told off by a kitten,” Blaise said dismissively, brushing off his cloak and giving Draco a firm push in return.

Draco thumped into a wall and stumbled back into place, giving Blaise his best glare. Life was particularly difficult when his old reputation wasn’t real enough anymore, when he didn’t really want it to be. He’d failed at being evil and it was still the only thing he knew how to attempt. He still wanted to be the best but he didn’t want to hurt anyone.

His favorite part about the forest was that inside there was nothing to hurt, nothing to crush, and there was power that walked right into his fingertips. He thought, wandering around the paths that night, that being in the forest itself was power, was control and banishing fear. The forest didn’t care what kind of half-monster he might have been.

The longer Draco walked in the forest that night the more he felt it in his bones, felt the way it breathed and shifted beneath him. He thought wildly that if he opened his mouth and spoke to it, it might speak back.

That night, the forest smelled odd, something he could only catch brief hints of through the heady scent of earth. It was, he realized after long minutes of walking: roses, a bright winter day, spice, and something else lingering and vaguely familiar.

Draco followed it, less the mystery smell itself and more the feeling that the smell emitted, like something organic and stagnant. He followed the winding paths and cradled small passing snakes in his palms and felt himself become lost in time. The smell became thicker, shifting between grime and newness, and he thought he should know it, thought he should know all the other smells too.

It wasn’t until he stumbled upon the source of the strongest smell that he was hit by why it all seemed so vaguely familiar. The thick heady scent of roses like the ones he used to wander through in the twilight back when the Manor was theirs. A winter day so cold it made his nose pink and numb, snow sparkling bright on the eaves. The sort of spice that made boys smell like boys, something sharp but so warm. Lake water. Lakes deeper and stranger than Draco knew, lakes filled with webbed plants, bug eyed fish, and unknown things.

The lake in front of Draco was a perfect circle, large enough that he had to squint to see across it. In squinting, he realized it emitted a cheerful green glow bright enough that he didn’t need his wand. Draco knelt down to touch it, at first tentatively and then with more vigor, his hands coming up shimmering with the glowing water.

He found himself smiling, wider than he knew he could, sticking his wand back in his pocket and swirling the green water around, taking in the smell of the lake. He wondered about the other smells, thought that the spice and the snow were new, but the roses might have been similar to something in his amortentia.

“Are you seducing me?” He asked the forest with a carefully raised eyebrow. He thought he felt the forest laughing, and she was.

He waited for an answer unlikely to come, eyes drifting across the opposite bank until they landed on a figure directly on the other side. Draco held as still as he could, watching the figure look across the lake. It didn’t seem to have seen him yet and he wondered what the forest meant by it, giving him someone but putting them so far away.

Harry, who stood on the opposite bank and was still learning to trust the forest, tried to make out the shapes across the pond. He couldn’t discern much but for the obvious trees, a few scattered rocks, and logs toppled over into the lake.

The smell of the lakewater clogged his nose, almost sweet as it floated up to him, tinged with things he’d never smelled in a lake before. There was treacle tart, warm and nearly physical, an herb he thought he’d smelled in herbology, and the sharp briskness of new fallen snow. There was something unnerving about smelling all of these in the forest, especially one firmly situated in late Autumn.

Many things about the forest made Harry feel cautious, although he was no stranger to breaking the rules. Something about it felt less like a rule to be broken and more like something bigger than himself, something that wanted to suck him in. The forest had allowed him to sleep better than he had in months, but he didn’t think he wanted to be devoured by it.

Harry saw movement on the other side of the pond, slow and unthreatening, someone standing up, maybe. He couldn’t see who they were, just the slant of their body and how still they held, staring back across at him. He wondered who else could be wandering the Forbidden Forest at night, if there even was anyone else. It seemed suddenly far more likely to Harry that whoever it was, the forest had created them, drummed them up out of dirt and stray leaves.

Though he had no reason to suspect so, he was sure that it was a friend, maybe because he’d had enough foes, maybe because he had begun to suspect that the forest was looking out for him. “It’s okay,” she seemed to say. “I have so many things to show you, just wander deeper.”

It should have made him nervous and he thought that Hermione wouldn’t like it, but she also didn’t know, didn’t feel the forest underneath her feet. If she felt it, she might understand.

The pond began to dim as he watched, losing its fluorescent glow and washing the forest in shadows so thick they ate up the figure on the opposing side with barely a whisper. The lake water sloshed against the rocks and Harry tried to listen for any signal from the mirror figure. He wondered briefly if it was him, reflected back, and cast ‘lumos maxima’ just to be sure.

The pond and the trees around it were bathed in bright, startling wand light, and Harry fruitlessly scoured the bank for any trace of the figure. He allowed his wand to dim, taking one last look back at the lake before trudging for home.

By the time Harry had lit up the pond, Draco had turned away as well, making for the comfort of his bed, only mildly troubled the fact that the smell of lakewater trailed him all the way to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning, he could still smell it on himself, foreign and strange in his bed.

“I don’t smell like a lake to you, do I?” Draco asked Pansy during Potions the next day as he gave his arm an irritated sniff and then shoved it under her nose.

She paused in her chopping to give him a curious look. “Why in Merlin’s name would you smell like a lake?” Her eyes narrowed and she set the knife down with a smack. “Did you and Blaise go skinny dipping without me? We haven’t done that since fourth year! How dare you!”

Draco hushed her hastily. “No, we didn’t go skinny dipping, and we wouldn’t go without you even if we did.”

“Good,” she said, her voice menacing as she leaned in to smell him. “You smell normal, not like a lake.”

He nodded, pretending to scan over the directions and waiting for her next inevitable question. This thing where he let his guard down needed to stop before he spilled all of his stupid secrets.

“Why exactly would you smell like a lake?” she pressed, working on the potion like the question wasn’t of much consequence to her.

“No idea,” Draco replied firmly.

“Seems fishy to me,” she said with a smirk, and Draco gave her the best scowl he could muster.

Harry, for his part, was having similar lake problems. He couldn’t imagine why he smelled the lake everywhere. It wasn’t like he’d gone in, and when he mentioned something to Luna, she’d cocked her head at him and asked if he was feeling alright. Luna assuming that he was hallucinating was probably the most worrying part of the whole debacle.

He tried not to brood over it as he hurried from Defense Against The Dark Arts to History of Magic, thinking with reluctant amusement that even if he did really reek of pond water, that still probably wouldn’t be the lowest point for his personal hygiene.

Not that smelling like the lake would have been the worst thing. It might have dissuaded the younger girls who seemed to find him especially heroic after he’d gone and saved the entire wizarding world. It had been almost cute at the beginning of the year, and he certainly wasn’t the only one they whispered after, but as the weeks wore on he had grown tired of being giggled at as he wandered the hallway.

However, he did suppose it was better than what many of the Slytherins faced. Some of the younger students, Gryffindors mostly, although Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws weren’t exempt, seemed to find a lot of joy in tossing insults and wads of paper at any Slytherins they passed. Harry wasn’t sure where they’d picked it up, since most of the returning students had elected to pretend the Slytherins didn’t exist. In fact, Harry couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken with any of them outside of class.

In some ways it was better, even if it felt strange for it all to cut off like that, all outward expressions of their childhood animosity dulled after all the death. Fighting seemed especially petty after so many on both sides had died.

That was how he justified it to Hermione afterwards, when he found himself intervening in the hallway. He didn’t even recognize the Hufflepuff boy who had tossed the ball of paper at Malfoy’s back, but he didn’t even think before taking the boy firmly by the shoulder. He hadn’t said a word to Malfoy all year, not even during the sterile summer drag of the trials, but it seemed like the only option in the moment.

“It’s pretty shite to throw things at people,” he said, eyebrows raised, still holding onto the younger boy, who looked borderline petrified. “I know, you think it’s funny. It’s not. What’d he ever do to you?”

The boy blinked up at him before shaking his head and replying with a mumble. “But he’s a Death Eater.”

“You know better than the Wizengamot?” Harry asked, keeping his voice calm. He didn’t dare look up to see if Malfoy had turned around. “He was pardoned. They paid their reparations.”

“No, but I-” the boy started, but Harry shook his head.

“Unless he’s done anything to you personally, you don’t have a reason to throw things at him,” Harry said as the boy went quiet. “Tell all your friends to stop bothering the Slytherins, the war’s over.”

The boy blushed maroon and Harry let go of his shoulder, brushing away from him and off to class, not bothering to consider the larger implications of what he had done. Maybe it was his stupid hero complex, but it felt wrong for the whole school to bully them, even with their history. Harry didn’t have much fondness for bullies, not after his childhood.

He was very careful not to look up as he made his escape, but that didn’t stop Draco from staring him down with annoyance in his gaze. Draco gave the boy who had thrown the paper at his head a withering glare that he hoped communicated just how much he didn’t need saving from firsties by messy haired golden boys.

It was bad enough that Harry had testified to his and his mother’s innocence at their trials, he didn’t need him savioring around after that with his stupid righteousness. Just because they had their little staring contests over breakfast didn’t mean Harry was allowed to barge into his life like that. The smallest bit of him registered that Harry was probably trying to be nice, but it was horribly overshadowed by the humiliated bit of Draco that just wanted to stop owing Harry things.

He was in the same foul mood when he made his way to the forest, after fielding conversations with Pansy and Blaise that involved pointed questions about Harry’s forays into hallway heroics.

The forest sensed the sulky heaviness in his footsteps and grew all of his favorite roses on the edges of the paths, making the air heavy with the smell of flowers. The forest felt the anger flow out of him, felt the petulance drip from his fingers and leave a hollow of tiredness in its place. He reminded her of a tree cut back for the winter, about to grow back larger and more beautiful, but still unsure how.

Walking through the most sprawling and beautiful rose garden Draco had ever seen in his life, he was confronted once again with the realization that he didn’t know how to make things right. For most of his life, he hadn’t even considered the question, and he thought that was most of the problem. Before the war, there was no right, only getting what he wanted. During, there was darkness and violence and all the beautiful things he’d ever loved covered in blood. This was after: panicked breathing and tentative friendships and trying to figure out what Draco Malfoy was supposed to mean anymore. It was hoping that if he kept his head down he’d stay alive long enough to convince himself that giving up wouldn’t be better.

He’d bent down to smell a large white bloom when he heard footsteps in front of him and stumbled back in surprise. Harry Potter stood before him, looking just as surprised as Draco felt, holding his gaze with a peculiar intensity.

“What are you doing here?” Harry began, gesturing first at him and then the roses.

Draco took a long inhale of the sweet flower smell, trying to figure out how this could have happened. He reached out for the forest, trying to find an explanation. Had Harry followed him into here too? Did he have to come and ruin everything?

The forest, giddy with excitement, breathed her answer into his ears and surrounded them in soft summer breezes. “It’s me,” she whispered to him. “I did it for you.”

“Oh,” Draco said, a small smile curling across his lips as he stared at Harry. “Of course, it’s the forest.”

Harry looked just as flustered as Draco imagined the real Harry would have looked, and it made him happier than it should have.

“This is so strange,” Draco said, giving Harry that little smile again.

“So glad you’ve noticed,” Harry replied dourly, and Draco laughed out loud. “Would you quit laughing at me?” Harry snipped with a glare that only made Draco more gleeful.

“This is fun. You’ve been so cordial lately, I don’t even know what to do with you,” Draco said, watching Harry flounder. He wondered if he could convince the forest to make this mirage more often, it was even better than the snakes.

Harry stared at him, dumbfounded. “What am I supposed to do, get in fights with you?”

“It would be more interesting than staring at me across the breakfast table and defending my honor from Hufflepuff brats,” Draco replied with a huff, relishing in the theatrics of it all. He could feel the roses around him perk up at their sparring, the forest herself just as invested as he was.

“I don’t stare,” Harry protested with his old glare. Draco had forgotten the way his whole body used to react when he would fight with Harry. It was exhilarating even though it felt less dire. More like a game, less like a war. “And it’s stupid that they make fun of you guys, most of them don’t even know what the war was like.”

“And no one does, do they? Except for us,” Draco said loftily. “Chosen boys.”

“That’s not what I said,” Harry replied, aggravated as Draco slunk forward, curious to see if Harry was the sort of mirage you could touch.

In the forest he didn’t have to worry about hurting, in the forest it didn’t matter what he did and it felt like tasting freedom again, just as victorious and sweet as he remembered.

“It’s what you meant though,” Malfoy said, looking like he knew too much. Something in his expression made Harry nervous, and he hoped that the forest knew what she was doing by sending him Malfoy. Of all the people she could have picked, he wouldn’t have been Harry’s first choice. He hoped he’d get someone else the next day. Any of his friends would be good forest companions.

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Malfoy,” Harry replied, growing tired of justifying himself to an apparition. “It’s like you want me to go back to being rude to you.”

Draco cackled, a laugh that sounded like something coming unhinged, and Harry felt uneasy about the way he kept edging closer, gray eyes bright. “Yes, please.”

Harry narrowed his eyes, wondering where the forest got this Draco from, if maybe she’d gotten him mixed up with someone else, if it had been so long since she’d known him that she’d become confused.

“You’re weirding me out,” Harry said cautiously, not entire sure how the forest would feel about that response to his apparition. Draco had asked him to, but it all felt wrong. “Is that rude enough for you?”

“You’re not even trying,” Draco replied delightedly, still grinning. It looked odd on his face, and if it was anyone else Harry might have been fooled into thinking it was untarnished joy. “Do you even remember how?”

“Maybe I’ve outgrown petty insults, Malfoy,” Harry said tiredly.

Draco’s smile shrank, his face going colder, and Harry wished in that instant that he’d played along and he’d called Malfoy names like they were third years and Draco was his enemy and not an ex Death Eater he’d watched fall from grace.

“You’re no fun anymore, Potter,” Draco said, and it was haughty but held a hint of hurt that Harry knew too well in Draco’s voice. Harry grit his teeth, wondering how he’d ended up hurting the feelings of a mirage of his childhood nemesis and why in Merlin’s name he felt badly about it.

“Sorry,” Harry replied, jerking in surprise as a hand curled around his wrist. Draco’s spidery fingers dug into his skin and felt under his shirtsleeve.

“You’re cold,” Draco said accusingly, shoulders held at aristocratic angles and an unkind tilt to his mouth. “Bloody cold.”

“My circulation’s bad,” Harry replied, trying to pry himself out of the death grip Draco had on his wrist. “I died, remember?”

“Pity you didn’t stay that way,” Draco replied, holding on tighter still, like he was thinking about lashing out. Harry considered reaching for his wand, but despite all of Draco’s blustering he didn’t feel all that afraid. Even at Draco’s most desperate he still couldn’t bring himself to hurt.

“You should try death, you might like it,” Harry said sharply. “Maybe you could pull it off this time.”

“Suicide jokes? Really?” Draco said, still keeping the vice grip on Harry’s wrist. Draco felt dark watery anger flow through him and he wanted to lash out at the forest somehow, for letting Harry be like this, for not making him anything like Draco wanted. “I’ve never pulled it off and you know it, that’s why I’m still fucking here.”

Harry paused at that, his eyes flickering with uncertainty. “You’ve tried?”

“Of course I have, you knob.” Draco hissed. “Weren’t expecting that when you told me to kill myself, did you? Bet that guilt feels terrible.”

“I was talking about Dumbledore, I didn’t really mean-” Harry replied quietly, his arm limp in Draco’s grip. It was the most violent way he’d ever held hands. “I’ve never tried. Thought about it though.”

“Well don’t bother trying, it’s a losing game.” Draco said. “Although you might actually manage it. As you were so kind to mention, I’ve never had any luck killing much of anything.”

“I think death would spit me back out,” Harry said.

“We should both be so unlucky,” Draco said tiredly, letting Harry’s fingers drop with a sigh. Something in the forest swept up around them, warm and comforting, and Draco looked around wildly, feeling the ground shift between his feet as everything grew dark. He tried to reach out for Harry again, almost said his name as the world shifted around him, before he was deposited back at the entrance to the forest, tired and heavy hearted.

His heavy heart stayed that way through breakfast, where he met Harry’s sleepy green eyes over bangers and mash. He looked less tired than he had at the beginning of the year and Draco wondered if that meant he was sleeping again. Harry probably had an army of Healers at his disposal to help him get to sleep, a thought that made some childish part of him twist with jealousy. All Draco had was a temperamental forest and a half assed hallucination of a boy he’d obsessed over long enough.

After sipping his way through two cups of coffee and shoving down two slices of buttered toast, Draco made his way to the library with homework in mind. He truly tried to do work, but found himself browsing the few books about the Forbidden Forest the library had available.

They were slim books with faded covers and thick pages, and didn’t tell him much of anything. Most of what he learned was that the Forbidden Forest wasn’t to be understood, especially not by petty mortal men. There was a whole book about people who had wandered in and never wandered out, and it made Draco’s heart seize up. He wondered if he could get the forest to swallow him up too. He wouldn’t even have to die, he’d just live in the flickering forest forever.

Harry, on the other hand, knew nothing about the forest’s propensity for swallowing people it didn’t like. If he’d thought about it, he would have remembered how the Weasley’s car had gone wild after spending too long inside its depths, or that Hagrid used to make cryptic comments about people ‘goin’ in an never comin’ out.’

If he’d told Hermione the truth, she might have drawn the sorts of conclusions that would have kept him from the forest, but he never mentioned anything about it even as she badgered him about his late night jaunts. Perhaps subconsciously he had his suspicions and didn’t really want to be kept away.

As it was, he was haunted by the memory of the previous night’s hallucination, the way that Draco’s eyes had flashed bright and desperate, the way he’d seemed so real with his fingers gripping Harry’s arm like a vice. He wondered how much of that Draco was rooted in truth and how much was the forest gone awry. He’d suspected that violent sort of brokenness when he’d watching Draco fail to kill Dumbledore. The more he thought about it the more it seemed plausible. After Lucius has poisoned himself to avoid conviction, Draco and Narcissa had shown up at their trials with the desperate shiftiness of stray cats. After that, they’d disappeared out of public view and he hadn’t seen Draco until he showed up on the platform at the beginning of the school year.

Harry didn’t consider himself unscarred, but he’d wandered out of the forest into a world that wanted him to be okay again, into a world that was healing alongside him. There were some mornings he couldn’t leave his bed and face any of it, but much more often he could bring himself to put one foot in front of the other for the whole day.

Draco had wandered from one hell into another. He had the remains of the Slytherins but he didn’t have his family anymore, a ghost where his mother had been, nothing left of his father. His own body was a minefield of unkind reminders, and he wanted a new one. New hands that hadn’t drawn blood, new mouth that hadn’t said things quite so sharp, new chest that hadn’t been ripped open, new heart that knew how to work.

When Draco was in the forest, as he was that night, he was the closest to a king that he’d been since the fall, but a better one. A good king, maybe.

The forest was being especially gentle with him, making the air sweet and hanging the trees heavy with peaches for him to eat. The forest felt badly about the way that Harry and Draco had fought, as she’d hoped that the feelings they both held simmering inside themselves would have made them kinder.

Draco plucked one of the peaches from the trees and bit into it, the sticky juice running down his forearms. It tasted like summer sweetness and comfort and he tasted the apology even though he didn’t understand it.

He half-hoped that the forest would bring him Harry again, but he didn’t know how to ask. He knew it brought out the bits of him he wanted to go dormant, that Harry brought out all of his nastiness and made him cruel. Even still, thinking about his attention made Draco’s skin prickle.

Real Harry had always seemed to like the forest. He had been so irritatingly calm when they’d been taken there for detention with Hagrid, and Draco wondered if he still liked it so much after all the evil that had happened there. He didn’t actually know how Harry felt about the war, how he was doing, and it bothered him to think both that he didn’t know and that he cared about knowing.

The peach dripped down the sides of his mouth and made his chin sticky. He wished for rain and then felt it soft on the top of his head. It began to pour, warm rain and warm breezes and he hung his trousers and cloak on the branches of a tree, letting the water soak him to the skin.

It was an unholy deluge like no rain he’d ever seen before, thick and pounding on the path until it ran around his bare feet in rivulets. He could barely see in front of him so he stood in the middle of the path and finished the peach, tilting his head up towards the sky and letting himself be clean. He listened to the pounding of the rain on dirt and paused only when he heard the sound of another person through the rainfall.

“Wasn’t sure if I’d see you again,” he said to the mirage of Harry, who was drenched and standing a few feet away from him, his glasses speckled with raindrops. “Why aren’t you using a water-repellant charm on your glasses? Can barely take care of yourself, can you?”

Draco pushed his wet hair off his face and tugged his wand out of the waistband of his pants, striding up to Harry and spelling his glasses dry. Even as a mirage, he was mussed up and turned around and the familiarity of that was almost comforting.

“You’re different this time,” Harry said, bemused.

“Still the same,” Draco said, schooling his face into careful coolness. He found himself happy to see Harry and the surprise of it was making it difficult to keep his guard up. Last time he’d wanted to bicker like they used to but he wasn’t sure what he wanted this time. Maybe he just didn’t want to be alone.

“Does that mean you’ve forgiven me for last night?” Harry asked cautiously, and Draco frowned at the mention of their fight, taking a bite of peach so he couch ponder his answer.

“I’m dreadfully upset with you,” he finally decided was an appropriate response. “And I think you’re awful and cruel and full of yourself.” But I think I missed talking to you and I was only mean to you last time because that’s the only way I’ve ever really talked to you. We could try something different, if you wanted. Draco swallowed the unspoken part down with peach juice.

There was something unnerving about Draco, and Harry couldn’t place what it was. He thought it might have been his own vague conviction that Draco was lying, about something or someone. It might have been a side effect of being a mirage, but Harry couldn’t be sure.

“Okay,” Harry said slowly, trying not to pay attention to the fact that Draco was in a tee shirt and his pants, both of which were clinging to his body with rain water. It wasn’t that Harry thought him particularly attractive, but he had noticed his body, which was more than he’d done in a while. “So um, what’s the peach about?”

“The forest made them for me,” Draco said, reaching up to one of the low hanging trees and plucking down a peach for Harry, even though by all logic, the forest shouldn’t grow peaches. He pressed the fruit firmly into one of Harry’s hands and Harry registered how warm it felt, like it’d been up close to a body or generated its own heat.

“Is it okay to eat?” Harry asked cautiously, remembering how in stories eating fairy food meant getting lost in their world forever.

“Well, I’m eating it,” Draco responded as he sucked on the pit, which really wasn’t all that comforting since he was part of the forest too.

“This is really strange,” Harry said, looking down at his quickly soaking pajamas and Draco’s wet face. He laughed a little to himself and took a bite of the peach, hoping it wouldn’t kill him. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

Draco blinked at him. “Alice In Wonderland?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I have read, you know.”

“It’s a wizard children’s book,” Draco said. “Mother read it to me.”

“It’s a muggle book,” Harry replied.

“No it isn’t,” Draco replied. “If it’s muggle then how come there’s magic and potions?”

“Muggles like the idea of magic,” Harry said with a shrug, his own peach dripping juice down his forearms and mixing with the pouring rain. “Not that you know anything about how they live.”

Draco blanched, peach pit hard in his hand. “I don’t hate them, you know.”

“Could have fooled me,” Harry said, and then felt a rush of guilt at the discomfort in Draco’s expression. He didn’t look disgusted, more lost, like he was walking into something he didn’t understand. “Sorry, that’s not fair.”

“It is,” Draco said shortly. “I am aware of my own actions.”

“There are books at the library about muggles that you can check out if you want to know more about them,” Harry said, knowing that mirage Draco wouldn’t be able to, but still hoping the forest might play along with him. He felt the rainwater seep further into his collar and into his pants and was thankful for the warmth of the forest, even though given the season he should have been freezing.

“I have been to the library, I know what’s there,” Draco replied, with less anger than Harry would have expected.

“Just reminding you,” Harry replied kindly, and Draco blinked at him through the downpour, trying to figure out what to do with this new Harry, this Harry who didn’t mind speaking to him, who wanted to give him a second chance he wasn’t sure how he’d come by.

Draco nodded stiffly, afraid to say any of these thoughts in case it ruined the illusion. “I’ll consider it.”

“Cool,” Harry replied with a nod of his own and Draco felt the word ‘truce’ grow like crocuses in his lungs.

The rain grew heavier still and Draco felt the rivers wash up over his ankles and knew that Harry was going to leave, that they’d spoken as long as the forest wanted them to.

“Bye then,” Draco said, giving him a nod.

Harry nodded back, waving awkwardly as trees grew up between them and they lost sight of each other, trapped on either side of the criss crossing branches.

Draco didn’t bother putting his sodden cloak and trousers back on as he trudged back up the path to castle, casting a warming charm against the November chill. He wondered what real Harry would think about his conversations with his mirage, thought he’d probably find the whole thing laughable. It wasn’t like Harry had ever given him the time of day, he’d probably think Draco talking to a mirage was pathetic.

It was a little pathetic, he thought, with no lack of bitterness, as he took a shower so hot it burned a little. It wasn’t that he wanted to be real Harry’s friend or anything stupid like that, but he liked the way Harry was confident and still unsure, liked how his eyes sparkled when he got frustrated and how he was kind sometimes, unexpectedly.

Harry, incidentally, liked the same things about Draco, although he was more reluctant to admit them. As he sleepily showered off the peach juice and rainwater, he tried to reconcile all of the Dracos he knew to be true, all the shattered versions of him that Harry had met, on the train and through his years at Hogwarts and broken, in the bathroom and covered in blood.

He wondered which Draco was the real one, what he would be without his layers. He thought maybe he’d be the boy who stuck out his hand without ever thinking it wouldn’t be taken, the boy who clutched the sink like it could save him, the boy who held Harry the same way as he pulled him out of the fire.

Harry still remembered Draco’s hands wrapped tightly around his middle and he scrubbed a bit harder with the soap in an effort to not remember so vividly. He was so tired he was almost unconscious on his feet, and thanked the forest for whatever magic it held in its branches that was making it so much easier for him to find sleep. He climbed into bed with shower-damp hair and was out almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Draco Malfoy found sleep just as easily, and also found dreams. He was no stranger to dreams, especially not in the months after the war where he’d been plagued by snakes that tried to snap at his hands and curl around his middle until he couldn’t breathe, running away from unknown terrors, and walls that closed on him. This dream was different; it was barely even a dream, more a soft sensation of warmth and arms around him.

When he woke, he was only vaguely aware of a tugging feeling of loss that stayed with him all through breakfast and into Transfiguration, which they had with the Gryffindors. They were meant to be turning a turtle into a table, and Draco was watching Harry struggle to make a table suitable for anyone but a couple of mice.

“What is Potter doing?” Draco mumbled to Pansy as he tried to make his table less turtle-patterned. “Why isn’t Granger helping him? How does he think he’s going to end up with a full sized table if he’s crouching? What an idiot.”

Pansy snorted, her own table fairly successful, if a bit wobbly. “What a mess, truly. I don’t know how Granger stands either of them.” She made a face at Ron, who was doing the exact same thing as Harry. Hermione, perched on her own table, watched them with amusement.

“I think she’s going to let them figure it out for themselves,” Draco replied, gritting his teeth as he tried to turn his table back into a turtle for another try. “You have to feel a little bad for them.”

Pansy giggled, watching Ron and Harry confer with their books before having another go.

“Potter,” Draco said, raising his voice just loud enough to be heard. “What exactly do you and Weasel-bee think you’re doing?”

Harry looked up in surprise, narrowing his eyes at Draco. “I’d say minding our own business mostly.”

Draco cracked a smile at that, delighted that Harry wasn’t planning on ignoring him. He leaned across Pansy’s table to get closer, amused at how Harry looked both confused and irritated. “You’re never going to get your table anywhere past your knee if you keep crouching like that. You have to stand up to do it properly, the spell hinges on how tall you are. Did you even read the book?”

Harry looked like he was about to fire back with a retort, but instead stood up carefully, giving Draco a cautious look before trying the spell again, this time ending up with a table much closer to the desired meter high.

“Thanks,” he said, giving Draco a peculiar look.

“No problem, Potter. I love charity work,” Draco replied with his most winning smile before turning back to Pansy, who was raising her eyebrows at him.

“Did you just help him?” she asked, tapping her foot on the ground.

“Merlin knows he needed it,” Draco replied quickly, pretending to read his textbook. Harry could be dumb and chivalrous and start fights with third years in the hallway, but now Draco didn’t owe him for that, at least.

As class wore on, Draco found himself looking forward to his forest wanderings that night, wondering if Harry would show up again. He enjoyed Harry’s presence in a strange way, and hoped that maybe this time the forest would let them talk a little bit longer. He liked teasing Harry in the forest even more than he liked teasing real life Harry because in the forest he could say anything he wanted.

It was a delicious possibility, all of the things he could do, and he tried not to follow that path too far down, because he didn’t know how far the forest wanted to let him go. He felt a low rush of guilt at his thoughts, the ones that involved so much of Harry’s lips and hands.

Longing wasn’t an emotion Draco had been familiar with until he’d met Harry, and he’d felt it in the years since in all its sharp and striking forms. Desire wasn’t new, he’d been intimately familiar with wanting as a child, patterned soon after with getting. Longing was different, how it squeezed his chest like a boa constrictor and wouldn’t let him breathe when Harry and everything else he wanted stayed just out of his reach.

He really didn’t know what he wanted other than that he wanted to have him, whatever that meant. It was an ugly feeling but by that point, Draco had grown a lot of ugly feelings, and he was still trying to pull all of them out.

The forest knew that Draco wanted all of his ugly feelings gone, she could feel how they toiled inside him like a swirling blade, cutting him up even as he tried to move on. She also knew that Draco’s ugly feelings were part of him just as much as her darkest caverns were part of her, and that he would have to stop trying to rip himself apart if he wanted to heal.

The forest knew that Harry, unlike Draco, had always been intimately familiar with longing. Harry knew longing like a old war wound that pained him when it rained, knew loss like a shadow he couldn’t shake, knew that when he tried to fight himself he lost, so he tried to hold very still and hope that the agony would pass.

That night, Harry wandered into the forest first, already yawning as he took the familiar winding paths and then deeper, unfamiliar ones. He was never truly afraid of being lost, more afraid that the forest might stop working, that he’d drift back into insomnia and would have to find a new way to sleep again.

He wondered who he would see in the forest this time, if Draco was the only person he’d ever meet on the winding paths. He’d thought at first that the forest was simply projecting people it knew well, that maybe one day he’d get Neville, Hagrid, Ron, or even Fang. He hoped ever so vaguely that he might see his parents again, the ghosts who’d visited him inside her branches. He just hoped he’d never have to face Voldemort again in the tangled branches, but he felt somehow that the forest wouldn’t do that to him, though he couldn’t place why.

“I’m not sure I trust you,” he said to the forest, knowing on some level that she was listening. He listened back, for the first time truly opened himself up and felt the forest’s mumbling brush of a laugh wash over his skin, felt her warmth for him even in his distrust, and realized that she wanted to help.

“After all we’ve been through, Potter? Truly, I’m offended,” Draco drawled from behind him, making him jump and turn around.

“When did you get here?” Harry asked, Draco looking mussed and tired despite his careful composure.

“Just wandered up to find you talking to the trees,” Draco said, giving him a taunting smile. “At least these trees talk back, so you’re less crazy than you might be otherwise.”

Harry nodded, watching for a crack in Draco’s facade. Given Draco’s behavior in class earlier that day, he’d begun to wonder if the forest was creating not just a mirage of Draco, but a mirage of him from Harry’s own head. It seemed like the forest could understand him, maybe even read his mind, and it would explain why Draco was so unstable. “‘I’m always aiming for less crazy.”

“You do a fair job,” Draco said, something in his eyes darkly amused. “You’re sleeping again at least.”

“Yeah,” Harry said, glancing up at the forest in quiet thanks. “You are too. You look less dead over breakfast.”

“You watch me over breakfast,” Draco said, looking pleased with himself.

“You watch back,” Harry shot back. “We’re enemies, remember?”

Draco laughed, and Harry felt a smile tug at his lips at how silly that word sounded.

“How could we ever let each other forget,” Draco said, feeling a conspiratorial smile curl across his mouth without his permission.

Forest Harry was bizarre, both rough and teasing, quick to jump to conclusions but also to smile at Draco when he least expected it. Some part of him had long assumed that the only way to talk to Harry was to be cruel to him, since friendship had always failed before. He’d never considered gentle teasing, that the sides of Harry’s mouth could twitch up in shared amusement.

He wondered what exactly the forest had changed about real Harry to get him to smile like that, with his hands tucked absently in the backs of his pockets, a softness to his brow. Harry seemed to remember everything, seemed just as quick to temper, just as quick to speaking clumsily, and yet he didn’t seem to mind when Draco tried to talk with him.

“Gets a bit old, doesn’t it?” Harry asked, squinting at him in the semidarkness. The forest smelled like Autumn that night, the green leaves turning the colors they were supposed to, auburn and yellow, and colors they weren’t, pink and sky blue and emitting soft shimmering light.

“Being enemies?” Draco questioned, a squirming nervousness entering his chest. Wildly, he thought that having any connection to Harry was better than none, and then felt fiercely embarrassed for having thought that at all.

“Just being horrible to each other,” Harry said with a shrug. “I’m not saying I like you, it just seems childish for us to fight like we used to. After, you know, everything.”

‘Everything’ weighed heavy in the forest air, pulled the boughs of the trees down and made the air sink until it was heavy, until the forest itself was pulled in the direction of that word.

“I can’t think of any other way to talk to you,” Draco said finally. “How are you supposed to talk to people who aren’t friends or enemies?”

“How do you talk to your acquaintances?” Harry prompted, looking particularly brazen about this new train of thought, even as it left Draco with a crawling pit in his chest.

“You could really treat me like an acquaintance?” Draco asked flatly, glowering at Harry with the darkest stare he could. “You’re literally responsible for half of the scars I have. You saved my life and my mother saved yours. We’re not acquaintances.” He spit the last word out like it was something foul, challenging Harry to reply.

“No, I suppose not,” Harry managed finally, looking almost guilty. “What are we then? Friends? Ex-enemies?”

“I don’t think the plebeian lexicon has provided an adequate label for our situation,” Draco replied dryly. “Not enemies, not friends.”

“Okay,” Harry replied, and the branches sagged back out, the air lightening around them as the whole forest grew dark, the phosphorescent leaves blinking out one by one until they were left in clean darkness.

“Night, Harry,” Draco whispered into the night, half hoping he’d already been swept away by the forest.

“Night, Draco,” Harry whispered back, and then they were both buffeted away from each other and out of the forest, with gusts of air that hung heavy with treacle tart and roses.

The next morning, Harry emerged from his bed rested and cheerful, chucking a dirty sock at Ron, who had class in an hour but enjoyed staying in bed until the last possible second.

Ron rolled over with a groan, blinking up at him with groggy eyes. “Why are you so chipper this morning?”

Harry shrugged, pulling on his socks with a smile. “Just slept well.”

Ron made a face and pulled the covers up over his head. “I’ll say this for your insomnia, it made you less fucking annoying in the morning.”

“You’ll survive,” Harry replied. “Now put a shirt on and come to breakfast with me.”

Ron groaned, sliding out of bed with all the drama he could summon, his hair sticking up every which way. “Although I don’t have to pry you out of bed now so I guess that’s an improvement.”

“You’d hate mornings no matter what I did,” Harry said, knocking Ron on the head with with his shoe as he went to put them on.

“Very true,” Ron replied, tying his tie into a very sloppy knot that Harry knew Hermione would straighten before breakfast was over. “Not sure who Hermione will fret over if you get it all turned around, she’ll probably start on the firsties.”

Harry laughed, trying to coax his hair into something presentable as he imagined Hermione chasing first years around with blankets and tea. She’d hadn’t let up trying to take care of him since the war ended, and he wasn’t sure how she managed so much extra research and affectionate nagging on top of all of her schoolwork. “Someone should warn them before the headlines start. Harry Potter’s back on his feet, firsties cower in alarm from Hermione’s helping tendencies.”

Ron straightened his robes, a yawn stretching his mouth. “The horror. I guess we’ll just have to take one for the team and let her keep taking care of us.”

“What a nightmare,” Harry said, shoving his books into his bag, both of them knowing full well that Hermione was not only the brains of the trio but much of the glue.

Ron quirked a grin at him, shoving his shoes on. “Love that girl to death,” he said, a flush creeping over his already pink cheeks.

Harry tossed another sock at him, mostly in jest, as he was reluctantly endeared by their post-war relationship. Unlike he and Ginny, Ron and Hermione had fallen into each other just like he’d hoped they would. It was sometimes a mess of course, as Hermione had a tendency to overthink things and Ron was a bit pig headed even after he’d grown into himself, but it was also sweet and made them both happy.

As he and Ron made themselves comfortable at the Gryffindor table, Harry wondered briefly why he and Ginny hadn’t gone the same way. He couldn’t pin point a specific reason for why he never felt that pull again, though he’d tried to explain it to Ginny, who had looked at him with sympathetic eyes like she understood better than he did.

He kept expecting his feelings to return, kept expecting to be interested in her again, or anyone, but during the worst of his sleepless periods he didn’t feel anything strongly. Even now, after he’d so abruptly begun to sleep again, any whisper of non-platonic feelings for her seemed impossible to drum up.

He wondered if the forest would be able to fix that part of himself too, if he was slowly picking up all the lost bits of himself he’d left there. He guiltily remembered the image of Draco, the rainwater making the clothes hug his frame, and tried not to consider that the last person he’d felt a twinge of anything for was a mirage of his former enemy.

He didn’t exactly want to take mirage Draco out to Madame Puddifoot’s, he just might have wanted to touch him, curl against him and feel his skin. He didn’t know why he felt that way, and thought exploring it would only add to the gnawing ache in his stomach.

Across the dining room, he searched for the familiar pair of gray-blue eyes, finding them without much difficulty. Draco was watching him back, but when they locked eyes, Draco looked up at the ceiling like that had been his intention all along.

Look at me you git, Harry thought as he took an irritated bite of scrambled eggs.

“I think he’s pretending not to look,” came a voice from his right, just loud enough to jolt him out of his thoughts but not so loud as to attract the attention of the rest of the table.

“Shouldn’t you be at the Ravenclaw table?” Harry asked, watching as Luna tore her muffin into neat pieces, looking as if she’d been there the whole time even though she certainly hadn’t been when Harry had sat down. “Who’s pretending not to look?”

“You’re the one staring at him.” She stuck a piece of muffin into her mouth. “I’ve been switching tables all year, I can’t believe you’re just noticing. Well, I suppose I can believe it, you’ve only just started to return to us, haven’t you?”

Harry blinked over at her, deciding that arguing was futile. “I was just seeing what he was up to,” he offered, hoping that was something close to an adequate excuse.

She nodded, eyes too bright for the morning. “I understand.”

Harry wasn’t entirely sure what she understood, but he thought it better to finish his eggs and tune back into the idle chatter of the table than to ask for clarification.

He wondered if she knew how alive the forest was. He had a feeling that she might know much more than he did, but was afraid that the game would be up if he asked her. It was an odd sort of secret, because it wasn’t bad, not really, but he had a strong conviction that telling other people would spoil it somehow. He couldn’t tell if it was the Draco bit or the fact that the forest seemed to be recalibrating him at a primal level, but the fact remained.

That night, as he walked into the forest again, he felt the branches sway in welcome like he was being met by a very old friend. Even though he hadn’t been coming for a week yet and had only just become accustomed to the forest’s aggressive vitality, the sense of bubbling affection only became stronger the more he visited. The forest seemed particularly normal that night, and he’d almost given up on seeing anything strange when a large snake slithered out into the middle of the path to greet him.

It was pale green and speckled with diamond patterns, with scales that shimmered in the half light. Bobbing its head at him, it hissed out a low hello.

Harry stared, the slow elegant sounds of parseltongue making his lips twitch. He hadn’t used it in years and wasn’t sure if he still could, unsure if that part of him had stayed dead.

“I know you can understand me, Harry Potter,” it hissed lazily, slithering up in a graceful coil of muscle to curl up around his feet like a cat. Harry wondered wildly if the creature in front of him was Draco in another form, but shook the thought from his head.

“Yeah, I can,” Harry said, in English, and the snake gave an irritated flick of its tongue. “I don’t know, I don’t think I can speak it.”

“Of course you can, it’s still a part of you,” the snake hissed back, sliding up near closer to him, friendly, threatening. “You’re so afraid of all your darkness now.”

“I’m not afraid of it,” Harry hissed petulantly, his tongue flicking easily around the syllables like it’d been waiting to do so. Harry disliked the way the snake somehow managed to look knowing.

“Terrified,” the snake said, beginning a slow loop around him. “You’re terrified. That’s the real reason you can’t sleep, isn’t it? You’ve become afraid of all the dark.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark,” Harry replied, the urge to stun the snake and run nearly overwhelming him. He didn’t fancy fighting with a ten foot long snake but the words it said itched at his skin. He didn’t even know if they were true, only that he didn’t want to be reminded of all the times he’d been afraid. “That’s not why I can’t sleep at all.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” the snake said, continuing its slow loop. The forest was encroaching in around them, growing darker and wilder at the edges, and Harry felt the first flares of fear in his chest. “Your darkness can only hurt you if you pretend it isn’t there. If you pretend you don’t have to know it. Then it’ll encroach in...” the snake slid around and up his leg in one awful movement, curling up over his abdomen and around his neck, never squeezing, just laying there, heavy and writhing. “And swallow you whole.”

The forest swept out from under him in a shock of blackness and he felt the snake unloop from his neck. A chill crept up his spine and tore at his head as he fell briefly, and then found himself on the cold ground. And then couldn’t find himself at all.

Nearby, Draco had been busying himself with a book he’d snuck out of the library. Normally, he didn’t sneak books out, but he didn’t particularly want anyone to find him reading this one, despite the fact that he quite liked appearing well read. It was thick, with a worn old cover: ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ embossed in fancy silver font.

Despite making it close to thirty pages in since dinner, he didn’t think he understood muggles any better. These muggles seemed awfully adventurous and obsessed with the sea, but he thought it might just be the book. He’d have to ask Harry, if he ever decided to show up.

He was just finishing what must have been the fifteenth line of fish description when a rustling in the leaves distracted him, the woods parting to reveal the largest snake he’d ever seen, feet longer than Nagini and thicker as well, a slightly softer green.

Draco held very still, watching the snake with wide eyes as nausea slid up the back of his throat. “Hello,” he said quietly, hoping this was another one of the forest’s plans, that she was still protecting him.

He saw Nagini in the thick scaled body and intelligent eyes, even though he knew this snake couldn’t be her. Horrid memories trickled through his brain, of threats, idle and serious, of snapping jaws unhinging, the dripping of venom on the table, the words ‘swallowed whole.’

“You’re so afraid, little one,” the snake said, the hissing voice echoing in his head almost amused. “I remind you of someone, don’t I?”

Draco felt unbearably small, felt himself shrinking until the snake was the only thing left, and had to swim back up to find his voice again. “Yes,” he choked out, barely daring to blink.

“A shame,” the snake said, slithering just slightly closer and blinking its eyes in amusement when Draco flinched. “I won’t hurt you, nothing in this forest will hurt you.”

Draco nodded, trying to sit up straighter. “What do you want from me?”

“I want to show you something,” the snake said, dipping his head at Draco in a gesture of respect. Draco stared at the snake in a moment of shock, before dipping his head quickly back, nearly dropping the book in the process.

“I remember when you were so proud,” the snake said, pulling its head back up to look him in the eye. “It used to get you into trouble.”

“It did,” Draco replied, folding the page over in his book and standing up carefully. “I’m very good at getting myself into trouble.”

“Well why else would you be wandering around the Forbidden Forest at night?” the snake asked, slithering up closer with careful slowness. “Don’t worry, little one, don’t worry. Just follow me.”

Draco tucked his book under his arm and followed as far behind the snake as he could. He was lead through the parting branches, only the odd night light of the forest to guide his way.

“You haven’t asked where we’re going,” the snake said to him, its path slow and methodic.

“I don’t know where anything is in the forest, it’s not like it would matter,” Draco replied, looking up at the branches, all of which looked the same, twisted and heavy. “And I don’t have a choice, really.”

“You do,” the snake said. “But you want to follow me, I can feet it in your footsteps. You’re very familiar with how darkness works, you know that if it was going to hurt you it would have started already.”

“What?” Draco asked, squinting at the snake. “I’ve what?”

The snake just twined further into the woods without a reply, its long body leaving a winding path in the dirt. Draco followed close behind it, careful not to tread on the coils of tail and trying to keep the awful memories of Nagini from dripping into his mind.

They entered a clearing lit by dipping and bobbing lightning bugs, some like the ones Draco had seen charmed to fly around the Malfoy gardens as a boy and some like nothing he’d ever seen before, lighting up in shades of bright pink and soft blue, glittering and floating through the air.

In the center of the clearing lay Harry, his glasses askew on his face and his hair even more of a mess than usual, laying in a bed of fallen leaves and flower petals.

“Is he sleeping?” Draco asked the snake, who was circling them with slow precision. Draco felt a strong wave of protection, a sense of intense safety in the clearing that overwhelmed even his thrumming alarm at the snake.

“Something like that,” the snake said, bobbing its head. “Why don’t you try and wake him up?”

Draco’s stomach dipped at the suggestion and the quiet insinuation behind it that he couldn’t quite parse. This felt more deliberate than their other encounters, as if the forest wanted him to do something, make some kind of move forward.

“Just wake him up?” Draco asked uncertainly, sneaking another glance at Harry. His skin was illuminated by the lazy flickering of the lightning bugs, candy colors ghosting across his skin.

“I’ll be close by,” the snake hissed instead of answering, sliding off into the forest and leaving them alone. It felt more like a comfort than a threat, and Draco took a steadying breath, taking the few steps towards where Harry lay.

“Potter,” he said shortly, disliking the way his voice cracked on the second syllable. Harry looked too vulnerable, his lips just barely parted, his tee shirt rumpled and dirty. “Wake up.”

Harry didn’t stir, only the movement of his chest suggesting he was present at all.

Draco knelt slowly, afraid to disturb him even though he was trying to. “Potter wake up,” he repeated, kneeling down next Harry’s head, his knees on the bed of leaves.

It was bizarre to be so close to him, to feel the heat from his skin, for Harry to be the one who was laid bare. Draco remembered sharply the moment he’d crushed Harry’s nose under his shoe and yet couldn’t drum up the feelings that backed up why he’d done it. Maybe it was the intoxicating protection of the forest and maybe it was the way that Draco had lost his taste for violence but he just wanted to feel him.

“Harry,” he said, testing the word out in his mouth. “Harry wake up.”

Harry didn’t stir, and Draco reached out tentatively to touch him, his hand hovering at Harry’s shoulder before settling on his hand. Draco took it, twining his fingers through Harry’s and wiggling them slightly.

“Harry?”

Draco had a vision of sleeping beauty, of leaning down and pressing his lips to Harry’s and the beat after he kissed him awake before the whole moment would shatter. He felt it intensely, was almost aware of the sensation of Harry’s lips on his, and clutched Harry’s hand tight in a moment of panic and unease because he wanted it.

“Draco?”

Draco went to drop Harry’s hand but found it being squeezed back, Harry blinking up at him in the low light, his eyes the same green as the forest leaves.

“I was supposed to wake you up,” Draco said lamely, unable to tear his eyes away from Harry’s face.

Harry looked up at him for one slow moment, and then sat up in alarm, his hand clutching Draco’s even tighter as he reached blindly for his wand with his free hand, pointing it wildly at the forest. “What happened? Where are we? There was a snake and-”

“It’s safe here, can’t you feel it?” Draco said, watching the way panic flared in Harry’s eyes, his breathing too fast, just like Draco’s.

Harry’s looked at him, the alarm fading out of his eyes as the forest stayed the way it was, lazy lightning bugs and soft comfort. It smelled immediately of treacle tart, so cloying that Draco almost choked on it, and Harry’s expression turned to wonder.

“It smells like-”

“I know,” Draco said, wondering when Harry would notice the vice grip he had on Draco’s hand and secretly hoping he wouldn’t. Maybe forest Harry wouldn’t mind holding hands with him, maybe that’s what the forest wanted them to do.

Harry finally seemed to notice his hand clasped in Draco’s, and blinked at it in confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure how it’d gotten there. “Did I...?”

Draco gnawed on his lip, a habit he’d tried to give up ages ago. “You grabbed me in your alarm.”

“Oh,” Harry said, snatching his hand back with a shifty look to the ground. “What happened?”

Draco shook his head, curling his hand back into his lap and trying to pretend he didn’t miss the pressure of Harry’s fingers. “What do you remember?”

“There was a snake,” Harry began, his forehead crinkling, and Draco felt the way that Harry spoke to him high in his throat, talking to him like he was an ally in that sylvan maze. Like Draco was one of his confidantes, friends, even. “It told me something about darkness?”

“About knowing it?” Draco tried to fill in, his eyes tripping over Harry’s body, how he sat so sprawled out, his hair pushed every which way while Draco sat up perfectly straight.

“No,” Harry replied with narrowed eyes. “It said I was afraid of it?”

“Are you?” Draco asked. “I didn’t think the famous Harry Potter was afraid of anything.”

Harry laughed, humorless. “I thought you were supposed to know how to read my mind?”

“No. You’ll just have to tell me,” Draco said, feeling suddenly that this moment was Real, like maybe real Harry was dreaming this, that somehow the forest had pried into his head. He wondered if on some level, real Harry could feel the heat leaving Draco’s body, the warmth and want and desire to consume.

“I’m afraid of the future,” Harry began slowly, like he was beginning a long exhausted list. “Used to be afraid of nightmares but not as much now, rats, dying for real, living, that all my friends will stop putting up with me, that I’m as shite as I think I am, that I’m not capable of love now, that I’m too broken for anyone to, I don’t know, like, want me anymore.”

Draco watched him as he talked, how he picked at the skin of his cuticles, shaking with it, how he held his chin jutted out like he’d fight Draco if he dared to make fun of him. Defiant even in his confessions, defiant even in his vulnerability.

Draco only did what he did next because he felt with certainty that the forest wanted him to. He reached back over, very slowly, and took Harry’s hand back in his own, feeling the callused palms, scarred and warm, and threaded his fingers back through.

“Have you read 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea?” Draco began slowly, speaking in that voice he’d perfected since the war, the one he used at his mother’s bedside when she was hysterical.

“No,” Harry whispered, unmoving, his hand still curled up in Draco’s.

“There’s an enormous underwater ship in it, and everyone in this other ship thinks it a huge fish of some kind so they try and kill it,” Draco said. “But they can’t, because it’s a magic underwater boat. I don’t know how muggles come up with these things. It’s not like they can have magic ships, this isn’t Durmstrang.”

“It’s called a submarine,” Harry said, quietly enough that Draco almost thought he’d misheard.

“It’s what?”

“The underwater ship, it’s called a submarine. They’re real things, muggles use them all the time,” Harry replied, sounding like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” Draco said firmly, feeling sharp relief when Harry gave him the beginnings of a smile.

“Where’d that come from?” Harry asked, still looking at him in that way that felt so important.

“I’m reading the book,” Draco said, fumbling to pick it up, shoving it into Harry’s lap. “You told me to read muggle books.”

“Do you like it?” Harry asked, staring down at the men in diving suits on the cover and then back at Draco’s gray blue eyes.

“They talk about fish too much,” Draco said, pulling a laugh out of Harry.

“Maybe choose one that doesn’t have ‘sea’ in the title if you don’t want to hear about fish,” Harry replied, almost affectionately.

Draco harrumphed and didn’t deign to respond to that particular criticism, flipping the book back open on his lap. “It’s not awful.”

“No?” Harry pressed. He was still reclined on the leaves, looking far more undignified that Draco would ever dare to. Cavalier, even roguish. It made Draco’s breath want to speed up and he tried his best to ignore the feeling.

“Could be much worse,” Draco said, attempting to remain aloof even when Harry started to fuss with his ridiculous hair.

“So you like your first muggle book then?” Harry asked, almost teasing as he handed the novel back.

“It’s been passable,” Draco replied with a sniff, his pride still niggling at him.

“Right,” Harry said, quirking up an eyebrow like he knew that most of his attitude was a front. “How far did you get?”

“Not too far,” Draco said, watching as Harry flipped through the pages until he came across Draco’s dog eared page.

“Hermione would be furious with you for this,” Harry said, folding the corner carefully flat. “She hates when people destroy books.”

“It’s not destroyed,” Draco said, scandalized that Harry would suggest that he’d desecrate a library book. “I’m not an animal. Books that are worn are well loved.”

“Is that what you do to all the things you love?” Harry jabbed back, almost playful, and Draco didn’t answer for a moment.

“I don’t think we can often help what we do to what we love,” Draco replied slowly, not sure why’d he’d taken the conversation into personal territory but wishing nothing more than to drag it immediately back out. “Read it to me.”

“What?” Harry asked, the book open in his hands, a strange look in his eyes.

Draco felt nerves curl up in his chest and only the calming presence of the forest kept him sitting at Harry’s side. It’s not real, he reminded himself sternly, it doesn’t matter what you say to him or what he says to you. “Read the book to me.”

“Oh, okay, I guess,” Harry said, shifting so he was laying on his side, the book spread out on the leaves next to him. He read slowly, his voice tripping over the names of tropical fish and Draco crossed his legs, careful to keep his posture perfect as he listened.

He felt his mind begin to drift after a few minutes, the day catching up to him as Harry read paragraphs about the inside of the ship in his quiet forest voice. He wasn’t aware of slipping off to sleep, only that when he was jerked back into consciousness, he was on the edge of the forest with his book in his hand, Harry already long gone.

xx

At present, the scholarship surrounding the Forbidden Forest remains woefully inadequate. The dangers implicit in entering a place so full of creatures deters many a casual scientist. In fact, many naturalists of much renown have disappeared into his leafy depths. Brenda Billshod, for example, began an expedition in 1975 only to emerge four years later with no recollection of her experience and her equipment nowhere to be found. While death and injury are risks that naturalists must accept, the Forbidden Forest seems to take just as many minds as it does bodies.

Reina Patel, Mysteries of the Forbidden Forest  
xx

Harry began to find that in the aftermath of their forest encounters, real Draco became harder and harder to ignore. Not that Harry’d ever been particularly good at ignoring him anyway, but seeing him every night in the dreamscape of the forest made Draco feel a little like a specter that wouldn’t stop chasing Harry around.

He still didn’t know why the forest kept choosing Draco for him to run into when she had so many other people at her disposal. With the resurrection stone lost in her depths, she probably could have brought his parents back, Sirius, anyone that had slipped through during the war. He thought muddling through his demons with those he’d lost might be more productive than reading books with Malfoy.

He’d only been coming to the forest for a week now but it felt like forever, like the forest was sewing him back up again. Like it was clearing the fog he’d been peering through for ages. He wouldn’t have even questioned it if it weren’t for Malfoy. He felt like the forest must have shoved them together for a reason. Like he was supposed to be doing something.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Draco’s book comment, over breakfast and class and homework. About destroyed things and worn things only being well loved. It felt overdramatic in the light of day but it had been so genuine when Draco had said it, eyes wide like he’d been making a mistake by divulging something so personal.

It was mostly surprising because he’d been sure that Draco didn’t have any experience with worn things, that he only ever got what was shiny and new. He wondered, as he walked out to the forest that night in the growing chill, if Draco’s words had also applied to worn people and if he’d even meant them to.

The forest greeted him with eager arms like she’d missed him, reaching down with her limbs to brush his head and entwine in his hair. Harry smiled up at the tangled branches, feeling the warmth of her affection as he walked slowly down the winding paths.

As he walked, the ground began to get boggier, the mud so sticky that he had to take his shoes off so they wouldn’t get ruined. A curling pale mist worked its way through the trees, almost soft in constitution as it tugged at his mop of hair and slid under his shirt.

He could smell the lake hanging heavy in the air and he bent down to roll his pajama pants up to his knees so they wouldn’t drag in the rising water. The air was warm, thick and humid like the deepest parts of Summer. A bird cawed in the distance, the sound unfamiliar and vaguely tropical. He looked around, finding the oaks and maples replaced with waxy rainforest leaves that dripped slowly into the growing swamp.

Harry’s feet squished in the mud and he worried briefly that he’d get stuck in the mire, only the steady slosh of the mangrove roots as he passed giving him any kind of reassurance. He stopped to take off his shirt and trousers, laying them across a low hanging branch, resigning himself to wading in just his pants. While he knew his way around a drying charm, he didn’t fancy the feeling of wet pajamas on his skin.

The water drew up over his knees as he walked through the shimmering lake and past the softly phosphorescent trees. The mangroves created twisting and winding canals for him to follow, leading him deeper and deeper inside.

He wondered what he’d come across that night and felt an unintelligible pang at the thought of Draco stumbling across him in his pants. It made him wish he hadn’t been so quick to abandon his pajamas. He hoped Draco wouldn’t laugh at him, even though he wasn’t sure of much else, he suspected that forest Draco’s laughter would be kind.

As he waded, the water came up to his waist, small brightly colored fish swishing around his feet. He’d nearly given up on finding anything in the maze of mangroves when he saw a periwinkle light glowing up ahead.

In the center of a larger pond was a weeping willow that glowed with a soft purple, emitting a sensation that felt like soft music but didn’t make the full leap to sound. Harry pushed towards it, the water above his belly button as he pushed through the fronds and emerged in the leafy cave.

Sitting in one of the boughs, as Harry somehow knew he would be, was Draco, draped in a lavender snake about as thick as Harry’s arm, wearing nothing but a tee shirt and pants.

“I was wondering if you’d get here,” Draco said primly, as if he didn’t look like something out of the strangest erotic magazine Harry had ever seen.

“You’re wearing a snake,” Harry pointed out, pointing a cautious finger at the animal lounging on Draco’s shoulders.

“Yeah, she talked me into it,” Draco said, turning to look at the snake. “They’re a little terrifying really.”

“Do you normally wear your fears as accessories?” Harry asked pointedly as the snake stuck its tongue out at him.

“It’s not scary like this,” Draco said, leaning back against the tree trunk. “I can read her mind, so I know what she’ll do.”

“You can read her mind?” Harry asked incredulously, part of him rewinding to when he’d been so sure that Draco had been the heir of Slytherin.

Draco laughed at Harry’s expression, a delighted cackle that Harry had never heard sound so charming. “It’s just the forest, Merlin you should have seen your face.”

“I can talk to them,” Harry called up, taking a few more wading steps toward the base of the tree.

Draco watched him imperiously, stroking the head of the snake with a deliberate sort of patience. “I do remember that. You tried to set one on me.”

“You’re the one who bloody conjured it,” Harry argued, wishing Malfoy was down in the lake as well so he could splash him for his trouble.

“Technicalities,” Draco replied.

Harry resisted the urge to scowl, wondering what had put Draco is such a tetchy mood. Harry was curious about the root of his unpredictability, if it stemmed more from the different versions of Draco in Harry’s head or the emotions that real Draco had. He just wanted to know why he’d been so soft once, why he couldn’t be soft again.

“Come down to me,” Harry called up to the snake in parseltongue, trying to find some way to turn the tables. He felt a quiet stab of regret even as he spoke it, all the associations it brought making him a little queasy. The snake quirked her head at him, looking interested, just as Draco let out a yelp.

“Don’t fucking do that!” he said, sounding so genuinely alarmed that the snake slithered off of him and draped itself around a nearby branch to watch.

“What?” Harry shot back, even though there was truly only one thing Draco could be referring to.

“Parseltongue, you absolute idiot,” Draco said, his hand clasped to the dark mark burned against his skin. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, talking to snakes like that?”

Harry would have attempted sheepishness if he wasn’t verging terribly close to anger. He barely even had a reason for it, except that he wanted more somehow. “Why should I even listen to you?”

“Because it hurts!” Draco shot back, and then seemed to regret it, straightening as much as he could while sitting in his pants in a tree. “When you speak to it, the snake in my mark moves on my skin.”

“And that hurts?” Harry asked, quieter, wondering if he could swim just a little closer.

“Feels weird,” Draco said, refusing to meet Harry’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, his words inadequate. Sorry was seldom enough.

“It’s fine,” Draco said with no lack of bitterness, leaving a silence only filled by the humidity and strange animal calls.

“Why are you so different each night?” Harry asked after a long moment. “Sometimes you’re so cruel and then you just-” The sharp image of Draco’s hand slipping into his. “You aren’t.”

Draco didn’t answer for a moment, reaching out to the snake and seeming to converse with it, stalling before he replied. “I don’t know how to behave around you. There is absolutely no established etiquette and I don’t know what to do.”

“Not everything needs etiquette,” Harry said, still staring up at him from down below.

Draco snorted at that, smiling as the snake slowly crawled back up his arm and found a home around his shoulders. “Of course it does, only you would be so stupid as to say something like that.”

“There it is again,” Harry said. “You’re being cruel.”

Draco stared down at Harry, at his humidity-mussed hair and the way the water lapped across his stomach. He felt his throat grow dry at the brush of dark hair there. He tried to find comfort somewhere, clutched the side of the tree and hoped for sturdiness. “I’m not being cruel,” He said carefully, examining his nails so he’d stop fixating on Potter’s bare chest.

“You should tell him all of it,” the snake said, soft silvery voice in his mind. “He’d care, he’s like that.”

The words bubbled up at his lips. It’s a coping strategy, it keeps people from getting too close. If I’m mean I can protect myself, it’s always been like that. I don’t want to be, but I don’t know what else to do. Especially not with you. I’ve tried to tell you that.

“You are being cruel,” Harry said, crossing his arms over his chest, apparently immune to how nice it made his arms look. “You could have just asked me nicely to stop if it hurt your mark.”

“Malfoys don’t ask nicely,” Draco replied icily, and the snake let out a tired hiss.

“Don’t you get to decide what Malfoys do and don’t do?” Harry said with that same tiredness, and Draco wanted the forest to swallow them both up so he wouldn’t have to work so hard to keep Potter out of his head.

“Yes, and I’ve just decided that they don’t ask nicely,” Draco said, trying to sound cutting. Harry was the worst, because he seemed to actually want to understand, and all of Draco’s superiority melted when confronted by Harry’s overly earnest pond water eyes.

Harry shook his head at him, looking, of all things, disappointed. “You held my hand last night.”

“Okay,” Draco said, feeling like he’d been pushed into the water even as he remained up on the branch. “Congratulations, yes, I did.”

“Why?” Harry asked, irritatingly stubborn. “And now you’re being standoffish and rude.”

“Why does it matter so much to you?” Draco bit out, and it barely scraped on the way out because he didn’t even know why he’d done it, just that Harry had seemed so alarmed and the forest wanted him to. He was beginning to think that the forest hadn’t finished unfolding her plans, and was just as nervous as he was curious.

Just as he thought it, the branch he was sitting on bent slowly down towards the water, depositing him stumbling back into the lake. Though his shirt instantly saturated with water, he stayed mostly upright and didn’t grab for Harry even though it was his first instinct.

“What was that?” Harry asked, looking up at the forest with concern. “I feel like she’s always pushing us together, like she wants us to be friends maybe.”

Draco nodded, resisting the urge to deny it just to push Harry further away. He looked down at Harry’s body and the water pooling around them, and had a sudden, more insidious thought about just what the forest had in mind. “Something like that.”

“Yeah,” Harry said, looking uncertain again, his eyes doing a mirroring flick over Draco’s body. Draco knew that Harry couldn’t be attracted to him - wasn’t he getting back together with the female Weasley? - and yet the thought pulled his breath faster and made his heart pound. “I think what I’m trying to say is like, you don’t have to be Malfoy here? You don’t have to pretend or anything. It’s just the forest, you don’t have to be anything here, I don’t want-”

Draco shut him up with a hand that curled up over his jaw, his thumb pressed firmly over Harry’s lips. They stood there in the water as Harry’s eyes widened and he watched Draco, waiting for him to say something, to explain the interruption, but Draco couldn’t find the words for why exactly he’d panicked, why he needed Harry to stop talking for just a moment.

The pause pulled and stretched between them, thick like the air and incomprehensibly heavy. Draco had nothing to say to him so he pulled his hand away extra slow, replacing his thumb with the soft pressure of his mouth because if he knew anything it was that if you were kissing you didn’t have to talk.

Harry’s lips didn’t give and Draco didn’t push for anything more, just squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried not to think or breathe or move. After two beats, maybe three, Draco pulled back sharply.

“I always have to be Malfoy,” he said, mentally cursing his breathlessness. He knew Malfoys didn’t kiss boys, but he knew that Malfoys didn’t kill themselves either, didn’t go crazy and ruin everything. Malfoys didn’t choose the wrong side and they weren’t scared, but it was all he had.

He caught a glimpse of Harry, wide eyed and pink cheeked, before he was splashed backwards into the water. He flew through pale blue bubbles much further down than the lake reached and was splashed back up onto land just when he thought he’d run out of air. He lay there, dripping and cold on the edge of the forest, his clothing arranged in a neat pile beside him.

After years of the freezing Slytherin dormitories and having his house occupied by the Dark Lord himself, Draco had become quite talented at warming charms. Even so, the trek back up to the castle refused to be anything but brisk and not even a scalding shower could entirely warm him back up.

When he woke the next morning it was with a persistent shiver, and he made Blaise come over and feel his forehead, only for him to report that Draco was ‘normal temperature’ and ‘probably just being a baby.’

Despite Blaise’s diagnosis, he and Greg still brought Draco up a muffin and cup of tea from the Great Hall instead of dragging him down to breakfast.

Draco suspected, though he wouldn’t have let it slip to anyone, that his mysterious affliction was a result of the kiss. As he curled up in his thick, emerald blankets he wondered what the physical effects were of kissing a mirage, if he’d caught some odd kind of cold.

It seemed unlikely, mostly because mirage Harry had been so warm.

It was only as he considered going to Defense Against the Dark Arts that he was forced to admit that a large part of his illness corresponded to the fact that seeing Potter after what he’d done was simply too mortifying to contemplate. He felt sure that Potter would be able to sense it somehow, and that if he had to be in his vicinity he’d turn into a nervous wreck.

It was for that reason that Draco stayed in bed all day and finished the strange book about underwater boats and endless descriptions of fish and had the house elves bring him dinner so he wouldn’t have to leave.

It wasn’t until all his housemates had gone to bed that he pulled on his loafers and tip toed out of his room, through the deserted common room, and out to the Forest.

He was absolutely terrified of seeing Harry again, even in mirage. He knew the Forest wanted him to be happy and sometimes he was sure that she wanted them to kiss as much as he was starting to, but rejection terrified him almost as much as his old nightmares did.

When he entered, the Forest sent a rush of warmth to greet him, a wave of rosy affection down from the waving branches. The air felt thick and summery, tiny blue flowers sending petals down like a rainshower, and Draco felt comforted in the knowledge that at least he hadn’t ruined everything.

“Did I do the right thing?” Draco asked as he walked, the petals landing on his shoulders and sticking in his hair.

The forest seemed to laugh, low and deep in her roots. “It’s not funny, you know. He probably hates me now. He’s not a poof and you can’t just go around kissing boys who aren’t poofs, they’re terribly sensitive about it.”

The forest seemed to laugh even deeper, an especially thick gust of petals washing the ground in blue. Draco kicked at a tree stump, hoping the forest knew what the hell she was doing.

Maybe mirage Harry was queer too, he thought with a glimmer of dangerous hope in his chest. He thought it especially cruel of the forest to do something like that, dangle such a beautiful boy in front of him, but only let Draco have him in the magical softness of the forest. He wished that he could somehow unfeel Harry’s lips on his and go back to before he’d noticed the way Harry’s body moved. He had been left unable to separate the tangle of Harry’s hair and the sharpness of his jawline from things that he wanted to touch.

Draco wanted to kiss him again, properly this time. It was pathetic, and it made him want to kick something, to tear something apart because it wasn’t fair that he couldn’t, it wasn’t fair that Harry wouldn’t want to, not even in the forest. He deserved just the smallest bit of something, even if it was stolen dream kisses.

Harry, as he trekked back into the forest, was slowly working himself around to a similar conclusion. He’d spent the entire day searching for a boy who never appeared, hoping to catch a glimpse of the real Draco so maybe the forest kiss would stop feeling so real. He’d touched his mouth so often that Hermione had asked him if he needed chapstick.

He’d known for a while that he fancied blokes just as much as anything else, but having Draco’s mirage kiss him was still a surprise. He was hoping the mirage wasn’t a construct of his own mind, because he wasn’t sure he was comfortable knowing that he’d dreamt up a Draco who wanted to kiss him. Nevermind that he was finding he wanted to kiss Draco back, which scared him just as much as it made him feel a rush of hope. He couldn’t figure out if wanting a mirage still made him broken.

The forest was especially warm around him, heavy with the smell of flowers and aggressively loving, like it was apologizing, although Harry wasn’t entire sure what for.

“Could you just tell me why he kissed me?” Harry asked, feeling absurd talking to a forest. “Was it you? Or was it me?”

The forest didn’t answer, just swirled more delicate indigo petals in the air.

Harry tried to catch a few, nerves making his hands shake again. He pulled apart the petals so he wouldn’t pick at his skin, trying to find his center back. The pinpricks of want and tight crushing desire for closeness felt raw in his chest after being dormant for so long. He needed something to ground them in so they’d stop making him twitch.

His mind spun in circles. If the forest made up Draco, that could mean that she was trying to coax him into feeling things again. If she made Draco up from real Draco’s image, it might mean that real Draco wanted to kiss him. Very unlikely. If she’d made him up from Harry’s head, then maybe Harry had always wanted Draco to kiss him. Horrifying. Confusing.

He walked through the winding paths just for something to do with himself, listening as the trees swayed and odd bird calls drifted from their branches. He smelled the soft warmth of Spring in the air but couldn’t understand what any of it meant. He worried that maybe the forest wasn’t trying to tell him anything at all, that this was some strange dream that he should have woken up from by now. Then again, if it was a dream, he should at least be able to kiss someone pretty again.

He nearly ran into Draco, who was walking in the opposite direction on the path, and when they met the Forest sent a wave of petals so thick they got caught in their hair and flew down their sleep shirts.

“You,” Draco said accusingly, looking remarkably foreboding for someone who was frantically brushing flower petals off of his cloak.

“You’re back again,” Harry said, for lack of any better sentiments, and felt an encouraging buffet of flowery air.

“Of course I’m fucking back,” Draco hissed, crossing his arms over his chest. “And so are you.”

“Are you okay?” Harry said, watching the worry lines that appeared on the sides of Draco’s pursed mouth, the shiftiness in his eyes, the way his chest heaved even though he wasn’t moving. “Are you breathing alright?”

“Clearly not!” Draco said, lashing out to hit one of the branches, and then scowling at it when he got it briefly caught on his sleeve.

“You’re not angry with me, are you?” Harry asked after a silence that itched at his hands.

“I’m furious,” Draco bit out, arms recrossed, chin held high.

“But you’re the one who kissed me,” Harry replied, feeling a grating irritation at how whiny his voice came out. He’d been thinking in circles the whole day, wondering what to do but never assuming that Draco would be so difficult. He realized, belatedly, that he’d never considered that Draco wouldn’t want to kiss him again, and then, more slowly, that he really did want to kiss him. Any person would, he reasoned, Draco was a mirage made for him.

“I just wanted to shut you up,” Draco said, but he hadn’t left, was still fuming in the center of the path.

“In the past you’ve usually just tried to hex me,” Harry bit back, his mind turning too fast.

“We’re in the bloody nonsense forest! I got confused! It could happen to anyone!” Draco said, his voice rising in pitch until he sounded manic, like he was going to burst apart if he wasn’t careful. “You get turned around in here and you were in the water and you wouldn’t shut up and I didn’t know what to do!”

Harry took a quiet step forward. Draco was staring into his eyes with a bright fiery anger that Harry wanted a taste of, breathing so hard Harry could feel it on his lips.

“You get turned around in here,” Harry said in dulcet tones that cut under Draco’s high pitched diatribe. “It could happen to anyone.”

Harry kissed him, because it was forest and it didn’t matter, because Draco was warm and vibrant and possibly the realest thing Harry had felt in months. It was stupid but he did it, because Draco had kissed him first. Draco’s lips had woken up some sleeping part of him and now he didn’t know how to put it to bed.

Draco didn’t respond right away, just let Harry’s lips hold against his just like the first time and then Harry knew that he had him. Draco moved ever so slightly, balling his fist in the fabric of Harry’s sleep shirt. He hitched one broken breath into Harry’s mouth, his eyes fluttering shut as their foreheads met.

“Are you good?” Harry whispered, pulling back for just a moment to watch the way the swirling indigo light played off of Draco’s face.

“Turned around,” Draco whispered. “I’m just turned around.” He pressed his lips back to Harry’s, kissing him with a thorough deepness that surprised Harry after all of his anger. He thought maybe he’d let the rest of it fall away, that the only thing that had to be left was this, just the softness of Draco’s lips as they moved slowly against his, figuring out just how each other kissed.

Harry slid his hands along the curve of Draco’s waist, the dip just barely apparent under his tailored shirts and the muscle that flexed under his fingers. He felt Draco curve closer to his body like he was searching out warmth, his hand creeping up from Harry’s shirt to nestle in his tangled curls.

Harry kissed him back fiercely, trying to return that slow fire with his own. He could feel an amorphous desire bubble up between them, an old feeling he chased on Draco’s lips with a fevered kind of passion. He registered that he was kissing like he was trying to take something, thought he didn’t know what. He wondered if two shattered boys would make one whole.

He worried both that the forest would tear them apart and also that she wouldn’t, with a pounding fear that made his ears ring. He was mostly worried that they’d separate and have to look at each other again, and then pick up all the pieces. He thought instead of that, they could just kiss forever until they were part of the forest, until they became trees, strong and intertwined.

They kissed until they began to stumble, heads too clouded to continue. They clutched at each other so they wouldn’t fall, kept their eyes closed so they wouldn’t have to see.

Draco thought perhaps, out of the all the terrible things he’d done, this might be the one to finally tear him apart. Harry kissed like Draco had always imagined he would, with a pushy sort of intensity, like he was trying to get his way even in that. Somehow Draco hadn’t imagined the desperate edge to his mouth or Harry’s hands on his waist as he pulled them close like lovers. He had almost hoped it would be more impersonal, that kissing a mirage of a boy in the forest wouldn’t destroy him so thoroughly.

He wondered if real Harry would kiss like that too and the thought made him so dizzy he pulled away, eyes nearly crossing as they came open. Harry still had his eyes squeezed shut, his face flushed and his mouth open as he panted. Draco didn’t really think about kissing him again, he just did, to keep the moment from solidifying and trapping them in the amber. He pressed their already spit slick mouths back together, accidentally tender.

Draco dappled kisses along Harry’s jawline, trying to pull himself together. He couldn’t find the anger back, mostly because it had mostly been a protective kind of fear. Harry had kissed all of the anger out of him, and left behind a technicolor sadness that pulsed cyan behind his eyes.

Draco sucked on Harry’s neck, tried his hardest to leave a bruise and almost smiled when Harry let out a breathy gasp. He didn’t think about what it meant that he wanted so badly to leave a mark, because thinking about it made his throat constrict.

“I didn’t think that you would want to kiss me,” Draco admitted, softly enough that he could probably deny it later. “I didn’t think that any version of you would want to kiss me.”

Harry tilted his head so Draco could get a better angle on his neck. “Are you the only version of you who wants to kiss me?”

Draco squeezed his eyes shut, feeling guilt and desire pool in stomach until he couldn’t tell the difference between the two. “No, I expect not.”

“You know I didn’t think I wanted to kiss you,” Harry replied, too fast and bungled up. It sounded like tree bark, like the dirt on the paths and Draco was briefly terrified that Harry would turn into a tree and leave him, so Draco clutched him tighter. “You’re the only thing I’ve wanted in months.”

“I want you too,” Draco said, mumbled into the skin of Harry’s neck, every part of him wishing he could run away but unable to slip out of Harry’s hands. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been held like he was something precious.

Harry’s fingers ran affectionately over Draco’s back, almost like he didn’t realize he was doing it. “This is so fucked up.”

“I’m trying not to think about anything but your hands,” Draco said, the honesty scraping his throat raw. “It’s for the best.”

“Okay,” Harry said, somehow pulling Draco even closer, so their bodies were pressed together. Draco could feel the bulge of Harry’s cock and the warmth of his chest and wanted to drown.

“You make me want to die a little,” Draco whispered.

“Likewise,” Harry replied with the ghost of a laugh.

Draco could feel drowsiness creep up on him and knew the forest was trying to pull them apart again, send him to sleep and take Harry back.

I don’t want to go, he thought petulantly, clutching Harry tighter until sleep overtook him and he couldn’t anymore. He didn’t remember getting back to bed that night but when he woke up, he smelled roses and the warmth of Harry lingering on his pillow.

The worst was that he could still feel Harry’s hands on his back and the press of his lips, no matter how many times he told his stupid brain that it wasn’t real. He thought about spending the day trying to scrub off the memories under the warm spray of the Slytherin showers, but he knew he couldn’t miss another day without arousing suspicion. He didn’t think he could face Potter but he knew he didn’t exactly have a choice. He just hoped Potter wouldn’t try to catch his eye over brunch, because he had a horrid suspicion that he’d somehow read his mind.

Pansy asked what was wrong with him quite nearly on sight, which was a record, even for her.

“Nothing,” Draco replied, feeling again like he was coated with the thick swampy smell of lake water. His guilt swirled around him like that insidious bog. For all his ability to keep his secret all wrapped up inside, his shame might as well have been laid bare for as terrible as he felt. “Just in a bad mood.”

Pansy frowned, reaching over to press her palm against his forehead. “You don’t feel sick.”

“Not sick,” he replied, taking a long sip of his tea. He didn’t think he could stomach food, there wasn’t much room in there around all the nerves.

Her pout deepened and she leaned up against him to try and offer comfort. “But you’re sleeping again.”

“It’s not that, Pans,” Draco replied, drumming up all of his quiet patience. He almost could have told her, except that speaking it out loud would have made it horribly real.

“Can I do anything?” she asked. Annoyance sparked up his spine even though he knew she was just trying to be nice.

“I just need a few days,” he said, keeping his voice level as he held his coffee, steadied his breathing, and didn’t look over at the Gryffindor table. When he’d begun going to the forest he’d hoped that she would swallow him whole but he hadn’t realized she might try to ruin him first. The comforting winds and soft petals seemed cruel, like a honey coated way to lure him in just so she could tear him apart again.

He wasn’t sure he really believed that, but if he could shove the forest back into a box and forget about her then the humiliation wouldn’t sting so deeply.

He managed, maybe for the first time all year, to resist glancing over at the Gryffindor table. It was only the oppressive fear that gripped him at the thought of Harry meeting his eyes that allowed it, but it was the smallest victory.

At the Gryffindor table, Harry was having no such luck. He was glad that it was scarf season, because he’d begged a chill and wore his scarf wrapped firmly around the bruised skin of his neck. He’d woken up in his own bed, realizing in horror both what he’d done and finding that the evidence hadn’t disappeared along with Draco.

He’d fussed with spells he half remembered but the bruise hadn’t faded even the smallest bit. It wasn’t like he could go around asking for help. Telling his friends he’d been off snogging hallucinations in the woods wouldn’t convince them of his sanity.

Draco, the real one across the hall, had a cup of something in his hands and wouldn’t look at him, no matter how long he stared across the tables. He usually looked up at least once, and Harry thought dourly that on some subconscious level he must suspect the stupid thing Harry had done.

“You’re staring,” Hermione observed, cutting up her sausage into bite sized pieces.

“Yeah,” Harry said tiredly as he returned his eyes to his plate, too far gone to even bother with an excuse.

“This has been a good week for you,” she prompted. “Since you’ve been sleeping.”

Harry blinked at her, willing himself to nod. It seemed like he’d been going to the forest forever, like everything that had existed before the forest was a sepia blur and it was only after that he’d been able to shift his life back into color. “Can’t all be steps forward, can it?” he said, shaking himself out and giving her a smile he hoped was encouraging.

She nodded. “No I know, I just-” she seemed to run out of things to say and bit her lip instead.

Harry could guess what she would have told him, probably something along the lines of ‘I just don’t want you to go back to where you were’ or ‘I just want you to be okay again.’ “I know too.”

“You’re doing great,” she said decisively, leaning on her elbow so she could look at him properly.

“I’m trying,” Harry replied, trying to lighten the mood. “Don’t look so serious, would you? You’d think I was on my death bed.”

“Well you were!” Hermione replied, spearing her sausage and putting on a bit of a show of being indignant.

“Are we discussing the magical circumstances of Harry’s near death?” Ron put in, leaving a discussion with Neville about their homework to join the conversation. “My favorite circus trick, that. Do you think we could get him to do it on command? Maybe make a traveling show out of it?”

Harry shot him a grateful smile as Hermione grinned and threw her napkin at him. “We could call it The Boy Who Lived Dies - Just Kidding,” Harry said, shoving all of the twisty forest memories from his mind. The forest made him so much better, made him feel far less broken even as it gave him a secret that made his insides crawl and slosh.

“I personally like ‘The Boy Who Died Part 2,’” Ron suggested. “I think it has a nice ring to it.”

“How about Harry Potter: Wanted Dead and Alive?” Hermione offered, looking quite proud of herself.

“We’ll have a Gryffindor-wide vote on it of course,” Ron said, gesturing at the rest of the table, a few of whom had stopped to listen.

Harry grinned, focusing on the light airy feeling in his chest instead of the secret roiling in his gut. He wondered if he could slice his lives in half, if he could be happy and unbroken during the day and still go to the forest at night and kiss Draco. He had a nagging feeling that they were inextricable, that the dark twisty part informed the light part and maybe vice versa. He didn’t want to think about the bleed-over.

That night, he returned the forest with shaking fingers and nerves sprouting heavy in his heart. He was never good at compartmentalizing but he’d tried his best. He shoved the forest memories into the pit in his stomach until the moment he left the castle and walked out into the chilly night air.

He sifted through them, through what Draco had said about all versions of him wanting to kiss Harry. That was the most unsettling part, really. It was horrifying to think that he wanted to kiss Draco, but it also came as a sort of begrudging realization, because Draco was attractive if nothing else. The idea that the real Draco might also want to kiss him made his blood freeze.

He’d never thought of himself as overly good looking but Draco wanting to kiss him couldn’t be anything but aesthetic, nothing else made sense. Maybe Malfoy would have been into how fucked up it was, the feeling that they were doing something forbidden. Harry was, a little bit.

When he entered the forest that night he registered the spaces between the trees as peculiarly empty, even as the trees reached down to wish him a good night. The paths were simple that night, sending him in slow circles and up small inclines.

He tried to smell for something other than the normal rawness of the forest, the bright swish of pine trees and slowly rotting leaf litter, but found none of the smells he’d slowly begun to associate with Draco.

After wandering for a good while, he stopped, sitting down on a rock and nearly opening his mouth to ask a question. He’s not here, is he?

He didn’t ask, because he already knew the answer.

xx

“The Forbidden Forest, though known to have the natural equivalent of a temper, seems to also boast a strong mothering instinct. There have been instances of children lost in the Forbidden Forest who have turned up safe and sound on the outskirts of the forest. They often boast tales of softly glowing leaves and sweets that hang from the branches. It’s unclear what the Forbidden Forest’s motivation for these acts of protection are, except that it may be able to sense when someone is truly alone and in need.”

Tara Martinez, Guide to Earth Magic

xx

In his bed, Draco could feel the pull of the forest more intensely than he remembered it. It began as a peculiar feeling in his chest that felt like loss and then grew stronger, making the tips of his fingers ache. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was missing, if it was Harry or the forest or some combination of both, but he curled deeper into his covers and resisted it with all of the strength he could pull together.

He could feel sleep eluding him, seeming almost gleeful in its evasion and felt a desperate kind of melancholy descend upon him. He just wanted to kiss Potter, to feel how his chest felt underneath his shirt and be held again. It had been so long since anyone had kissed him like that, far before the war at least. He was a marked man, complexly so. It wasn’t exactly like there were people lining up to kiss him, and certainly not to kiss him like Harry had.

“Fuck you, Potter,” he whispered, just for dramatic effect, as he pulled his covers up higher over his head and wished for sleep.

That night, Draco had his first nightmare since he’d gone to the forest the first time. It was an old one, so old he could recite it backwards and forwards again. It shouldn’t have been scary anymore, after all of its overplayed gore and fear but it left him sweaty and hyperventilating anyway.

First, was the darkness. The kind that sucked all the air out of a space and laced his lungs with something heavy. Then, was the noise, and there were three: hissing, biting, and sliding. Then there was the snake, creeping up up behind him, or in front of him, or onto someone he loved.

This time, it was Harry, unaware as the snake slunk closer to his feet and bit at him, ruthless as it began to tear him to pieces, methodical and cruel. Draco had tried to warn him, his heavy lungs unmoving as he rasped out a warning too late.

He woke with that same old venom taste in his mouth and cracked open the book from underneath his pillow, accepting that not sleeping was better than the dreams.

The next morning he didn’t wake, merely put his book down and crawled from behind his curtains when he heard Blaise rusting outside.

“You didn’t sleep did you?” Blaise asked as Draco slumped in the direction of the showers.

“Can’t say I did, no,” Draco replied tartly, slinking into the communal bathroom with tired eyes. He felt vaguely shell shocked into awakeness, but knew the crash was soon on the horizon. The problem was that he could convince himself during the night that he’d be okay in the morning but his sleeplessness always dragged him back down.

“I could probably get a hold of some dreamless sleep for you if you wanted to try that again,” Blaise said kindly, appearing next to him at the sink. He said it like it was the smallest thing in the world, like he was doing it anyway and giving it to Draco wouldn’t be a problem at all, even though Draco knew it was a hassle. He appreciated it, even though he knew it wouldn’t help.

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied tiredly, knowing even then that it would be the descriptor for the rest of the day. He could feel the word tacking itself onto anything he would try to do. Tiredly.

Blaise nodded, beginning to brush his teeth and leaving well enough alone. If there was anything Draco appreciated about the Slytherins it was that they knew when to push and when to just stand there quietly. Sometimes the act of being there was more important than anything they actually did. It wasn’t like he could go spilling his guts about what had happened, even to them. As far as he was concerned, it was over, he just had to get his stupid brain on board.

Draco spent that first forestless day in a fog and Harry spent it lost in a mist. It was a gloomy sort of mist that he was doing his best to hide behind a chipper expression. Harry had slept, which was something, but Draco had completely avoided looking at him over breakfast, oblivious to the stares Harry sent him all morning.

It was frustrating not to have either the glances across the great hall or the sharpness of his tongue in the forest, and it made Harry want to do something rash. He knew it wasn’t in his best interest to antagonize Draco, but it took all of his self control not to march over to the table and say something mean just for the hell of it. He thought he was beginning to understand what forest Draco had meant about not knowing how to interact with him. In the forest, it had seemed to make more sense, but in real life all Harry knew how to do was wind Draco up and try to goad him.

They’d taken small steps forward, maybe. The glances were probably not the worst, and Draco had helped him after Harry had defended him in the hallway. Not that a few civil words put them anywhere near calm waters.

When he walked out to the forest that night, he did so with high hopes. The weather had taken a chilly turn, and he wrapped himself up in his cloak as he crossed the grounds. The forest loomed grand and sprawling in the distance, and it wasn’t until he stepped under the first tree that he felt that emptiness again.

He felt something inside him deflate and he sat down just on the inside border of the trees, just sitting and watching. The cavern of loneliness opened up wider in his chest and he dropped his head, watching as small green sprouts peeked up to say hello.

They grew small white flowers that glistened like mother of pearl in the starlight and he sighed out his own apology because the forest could make him sleep but another body against his own had made him feel again.

“You took him away too soon,” he told the forest. “I wasn’t ready.”

The wind brushed over him in a low whistling tone that spoke of sadness, like the forest hadn’t wanted to, like she’d made some kind of mistake.

“Bring him back please,” he said, looking up at the sky. He realized with only the smallest clink of surprise that he didn’t want another forest companion. He wanted Draco, whatever that meant. He just wanted to catch that desire and not let it go.

He waited until the tiny mother of pearl flowers had grown up around his ankles and the forest had surrounded him with swishing wild grasses and birds that sounded like music boxes. He waited until some part of him finally broke into as many small pieces as it could, before he scooped them all up and began the slow walk back to the castle.

When he fell asleep, he did so with a few flowers strewn in his bed and his fingers picked back to bleeding. He imagined they probably looked a lot like his heart: scabbed and raw and mostly numb.

Draco didn’t meet his eyes that morning either and Harry would have exploded if he wouldn’t have had to explain the destruction later. As it was, he very deliberately joined back into the discussion on Gryffindor’s quidditch prospects. Ginny was telling them quite animatedly that their seeker was ‘almost in Harry territory’ as Ron scoffed in disbelief.

Harry watched her hands as they flew in front of her face, and tried not to think the word irreparable. He remembered Luna telling him that she didn’t ever want to be in a romantic relationship and wondered if maybe that’s what this feeling was. And yet, that didn’t quite ring true to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want one, he wanted someone so badly it made his chest contract, he just couldn’t drum up feelings for anyone other than a fucking mirage.

He made it through classes alright by continuing a very strict system of Trying His Best Not To Think About It. Malfoy sat behind him in Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts and while he could hear the soft laughter of his cronies, Harry didn’t actually have to see his face, which was a comfort. They had Ancient Runes with the Hufflepuffs, which was a much needed reprieve. He watched the Gryffindor team practice, Ginny making a very enthusiastic captain, but begged off the after dinner Gobstones tournament in favor of wandering the grounds in a sulk.

It was only when he saw Draco Malfoy alone on a blanket in the grass did he begin to question his own agency in the choice to skip dinner and go for a walk. He cast an accusing glare at the forest, which waved pleasantly in the afternoon breeze.

He took the slow route around the lake, finally arriving to where Draco lay in the late afternoon sunlight. He stirred as Harry traipsed across the grass, passing near where he lay on the blanket, the smallest smile growing on Harry’s face when he felt Malfoy’s eyes on him.

“Malfoy,” he said, finally meeting his eyes. His stomach dipped at the contact. Malfoy’s eyes were just as gray and intense as they had been in the forest. Somehow he hadn’t expected real Malfoy to look exactly like his mirage, with that same pointed nose and careful set to his bones, like he was always posing for something. Harry hadn’t counted on the gut wrenching feeling of want returning, even outside of the darkness of night. Malfoy was still gorgeous, still infuriating, and Harry wanted so desperately to kiss him.

“Potter,” Malfoy said lazily, sitting up on his elbows to give Harry a searching look. Harry tried his hardest to read Malfoy’s expression but couldn’t get past his mask of indifference.

“What are you doing out here?” Harry asked, hoping for nonchalance. He didn’t even know what he planned on accomplishing, only that Malfoy had bags under his eyes again and he was all alone.

Malfoy blinked at him for a long while, like he was deciding exactly which way to verbally berate Harry. He seemed to settle on something, his eyelids lowered like he did when he was trying to gather himself. “I was having a lovely bit of quiet.”

“It’s nice out here for quiet,” Harry said.

“It was,” Draco said, eyebrows raised as high on his forehead as they would go.

“Yes, sorry,” Harry said, cursing himself.

Draco heaved a dramatic sigh, but didn’t give a response, staring up at the cloudless blue. November was drifting in brisk and bright and it brushed the tip of Draco’s nose pink, even as he sat bundled in his robes and gloves. Harry considered walking away and leaving well enough be, but something tugged at him. It was most likely his own compulsions but he could pretend it was the forest or some more appropriate reason.

The wind pushed a few red gold leaves across the grass and sent ripples across the lake. Draco was ignoring him, although Harry saw the muscle jump in his jaw and knew that it was deliberate. Harry briefly considered trying to out-wait him, but he didn’t think that would make him feel any better about any of it.

“Are you, you know, sleeping okay?” Harry asked, his voice cracking on the first you even as he tried to keep it steady.

Draco gave him a look, his eyes bright with something close to disbelief. “Excuse me?”

“You look tired, I don’t know, you haven’t been-” Haven’t been looking at me across the Great Hall. “I just wanted to be nice, alright?” Harry looked resolutely back down at the grass, feeling a bit stupid. He’d never actually tried being nice to Draco in real life, and realized belatedly that he had no idea how it would actually go. Draco had extended an offer of friendship first, but that had been years ago, years full of taunting and fighting.

“Potter.” It was said imperiously, without a tremor but backed by some violent emotion Harry couldn’t begin to understand. “This is highly unnecessary. Any debts you might assume you owe to me, I can assure you, are settled.”

Harry looked at the place where the lake lapped up on the shoreline, and began to pull at the grass so he wouldn’t worry at his fingers again. “It’s not about debts.”

“Lovely, then you should have no problem leaving me alone,” Draco said, and Harry felt it again, that raw feeling behind the word alone, almost making it shatter. Harry wanted to scream at him a little bit, because Draco wasn’t okay, not in the forest and not here and Harry still wanted him.

“Why do you want me to leave so badly?” Harry asked, picking at old wounds. There were a million reasons for him to leave but he wanted to hear them.

There was a stinging silence, during which Draco breathed out a little too hard.

“You’re not okay, are you?” Harry pressed, glancing over at Draco, who got up in a huff.

“Clearly not, but you already knew that, didn’t you?” Draco spat.

“Why won’t you let me help you!” Harry shot back, getting up as well.

“Because you’re the bloody problem!” Draco replied, eyes wild. He turned on his heel before Harry could reply, stomping off across the gardens and back up to the castle, leaving Harry standing alone by the lake.

He could feel the forest in the background, a soft murmur of consolation but Harry ignored it with a huff, sitting down hard on the grass and cursing Draco’s sharp tongue. He’d told him that first night that he hadn’t wanted to fight anymore, and here he was, antagonizing him to the point of storming off. He knew it was his fault, but somehow everything with Draco seemed beyond his control.

He watched the sun slip down beyond the trees and then when the grounds had gone dark, traipsed back up to the Gryffindor tower to do homework in the common room until it was time for his nightly jaunt.

While Harry had watched the sunset, Draco had laid face down in his bed and wished for sleep that refused to come. Blaise and Theo had both given him sympathetic looks as he’d stomped into the common room and headed straight for the dorms, but he’d ignored them in a whirlwind of self pity and irritation.

It seemed unfair that Harry should be allowed to haunt him both in real life and in the forest. Even with his bed curtains pulled firmly shut, thoughts of Harry chased themselves around his mind like the tiny animals that crawled around in the forest’s undergrowth.

He’d hoped that if he stayed away he’d be able to convince himself that the kiss had been something other than fantastic, but he had the sneaking suspicion that as he got more sleep deprived he only became less rational and more tangled up in memories of Harry.

His stomach turned at the earnestness in Harry’s eyes when he’d asked if Draco was okay, as if he knew something Draco didn’t want him to. He must have spent an hour thinking up scenarios in which he had something witty to say back that left Potter stuttering and skittering away. He also thought of a couple where they ended up kissing, but that was neither here nor there.

As the hour ticked from three to four, some part of him began to understand that he was going to return to the forest, could hear the creak of the castle walls as they tried to coax him out, and the whisper of the trees and they called him back. Maybe he could go to the forest without kissing Harry again, or maybe he could kiss him again and have it not matter. He knew he was lying to himself, but it was all beginning to blur together.

The next day, he continued his militant avoidance of Harry. He didn’t look at him during breakfast even though he imagined he could feel Harry’s eyes scraping across the top of his head.

He didn’t have classes with Harry, although he staunching avoided glancing at Granger, like looking at her would be looking at Harry by proxy. He knew it was ridiculous, that he should be better than hiding from Potter, but he unequivocally was not.

Harry himself couldn’t figure out why Draco had dropped off of the face of the Earth. He’d gone to the forest the night before only to find it empty and still. It had tried to give him the prettiest fluorescent leaves it could, and pushed soft gentle creatures into his path but he felt the loss of Draco’s presence almost painfully.

Even worse than the forest was the look in Draco’s eyes when he’d stormed off by the lake, because that hurt had been real for both of them. He wanted to make it better somehow, but since he had no idea how to talk to Draco even if he could get him alone, it was a moot point.

When he finally returned to the dorms for the day, Ron was the only one laying on his bed, a Quidditch magazine hovering above his head. It dropped down onto his face when Harry came in, and he let it fall to the side as he turned to look at him. “Early night?”

Harry shrugged, flopping onto Ron’s bed with a sigh. “I think I’m doing something stupid and I don’t know how to stop.”

“How stupid?” Ron asked, flipping the magazine shut and scooting over so Harry had more room on the bed. “Fighting a troll at eleven years old stupid or bought my mum the wrong Christmas gift stupid?”

“Troll,” Harry replied, thinking that at least in that situation, he had some idea what exactly he was supposed to be fighting.

“Yikes,” Ron said, still staring up at the ceiling as Harry buried his face in Ron’s covers. They smelled like Ron and The Burrow and were comforting even as his hands stubbornly shook. “You wanna talk about it?”

“Kinda,” Harry said. He couldn’t exactly come out and say what had actually been happening. There was no way he could phrase it without it sounding horrible. Probably because it was horrible, but somehow it was less so when he was the only one who knew. “It’s dumb.”

“Think I haven’t let dumb things get to me?” Ron said, and Harry could hear deprecating smile in his voice.

“I know,” Harry said, letting his voice become muffled by the blankets. “Do you ever think I’m going to be normal again?” Everything worked in layers, he peeled the first one back.

“What’s normal anymore?” Ron asked, and Harry shrugged awkwardly with his face pressed into the covers.

“I’d love to know,” Harry replied. “I feel all wrong. Have for months.”

“I know,” Ron said. “I’ve been worried about you. Especially since you started leaving at night. Didn’t want to nag.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course.”

Harry sighed into the blankets, almost crawling underneath them just so he could hide better. “I couldn’t... I couldn’t feel anything? And now I’m feeling things but they’re not the things I want to feel.”

Ron hummed a quiet agreement, shifting on the bed. “Better than nothing, though.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were in my head,” Harry said, and Ron shrugged.

“Well you don’t want to kill anyone do you? Maim? Poison or otherwise torture?” Ron asked wryly.

“No, nothing like that,” Harry replied.

“Well then it can’t be all bad,” Ron said, reaching over to shove at Harry. “No moping.”

“The boy who moped,” Harry replied morosely, which only made Ron laugh.

“Doesn’t quite flow like the other one,” Ron said, and Harry mumbled his assent.

“I’m trying,” he added, rolling over so he was looking at the ceiling too. He knew the dark red fabric like it was the inside of his own eyelids and it helped center him.

“I know,” Ron replied. “All you can really do.” Harry could feel the affection in his voice thick as the air in the forest, the quiet camaraderie that still tied them close. “Wanna go do something?”

“I just want to lay here, if that’s okay,” Harry said, trying to let his mind settle. He wasn’t hopeless, he could talk to Draco, the real one and the forest one. He’d done more impossible things than making things right with his ex enemy. He didn’t think they could start over, didn’t think their history would dilute like that, but they had so many shared foundations that they might be able to build something new.

“That’s okay too,” Ron said, shifting a little on the twin bed so Harry had more room.

“Are you curious about where I go at night?” Harry asked after a small silence, Ron’s earlier words tugging at him.

“A little,” Ron said. “Hermione’s out of her mind about it, keeps bugging me to ask you. But I figured if you wanted to tell me you would.”

Harry nodded, flipping the answer over in his mind. “It’s the Forbidden Forest.”

“Shite,” Ron said, exhaling in one long breath. “Is it a You-Know-Who thing?”

“Not really,” Harry replied. “I think she wants to take care of me.”

“She?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool,” Ron said, voice level. “The Forbidden Forest is a weird place. Mum used to tell me she’d kill me if I ever went in alone. There are some nasty stories, it can eat people up.”

“I don’t think she wants to eat me,” Harry said. “Maybe just help me figure stuff out.”

“Just don’t forget to come home,” Ron said, smiling crookedly like he already knew Harry would.

“I won’t forget,” Harry said.

“You gonna tell Hermione?” He asked, his voice slurring over the H like it always did.

“I don’t really want to. It’ll just worry her more,” Harry said, feeling a little guilty at speaking the words, especially after telling Ron. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust or love Hermione, but she’d carried the weight of him on her shoulders for months now. “And I’m afraid she’ll tell me to stop.”

“You think she would?” Ron asked.

“I think she wants me to be safe,” Harry said. “I should probably tell her.”

“I can, if you don’t want to.” Ron offered, but Harry shook his head.

“I’ll tell her,” Harry said. “Thanks though.”

The warmth between them grew and stretched as they drifted back to safer topics, only breaking when Harry finally stood up and began to dress for his jaunt into the forest.

“Be careful,” Ron said as he left, reopening his Quidditch magazine and flipping to where he’d left off.

“Always am,” Harry replied, as he ventured out into the cooling dark. The wind was beginning to take on a late fall crispness, and Harry wondered if it would turn to snow soon, making his trek out to the forest even chillier.

As he walked into the forest, he had the odd sensation of stepping inside a kitchen in which something had been baking. A hint of warm bread and treacle tart permeated the air, firmly present but not overwhelming. He didn’t feel the despondent emptiness of the past few nights, and allowed himself to hope that maybe Draco was back.

He wandered through the sweet air, a faint mist beginning to snake its way through the trees and pooling at his feet.

It moved not with a drift but with a slow pulsing rhythm that reminded Harry of breathing, all soft and delicate. The old oak forests he was used to gave way to towering evergreens and birches with loose strips of elegant white bark, the path turning to a carpet of moss that looked quite close to velvet. He was almost positive that if he reached down to touch it, it would be.

“What are you up to?” He mused, unsurprised when the mist breathed out towards him instead of gracing him with an answer.

The forest had never actually spoken to him with words and he was fairly positive that she couldn’t, but he thought she might speak the messy and inexact language of human emotion. There was something giddy about her, tempered only by a measured kind of ceremony, like she wanted things to be special.

Harry wondered if she was trying to fix things again. She seemed to go especially kind after they’d fucked things up, trying to push them gently back together. He passed through the warm fog, seeing no sign of the blonde head he’d become used to stumbling upon and hoped he wasn’t making all of it up.

After what seemed like ages, he sat down in a small clearing the forest procured for him, pleased to find that the velvety moss was exactly as soft as it appeared. He wasn’t sure if Draco would show up that night, he was comforted by the conviction that he wasn’t as alone as he’d been before, that he only had to wait patiently enough.

Just as he was beginning to nod off, his head dipping down towards his chest, he heard the rustling of leaves behind him and the fog catching its breath.

“Hello?” he called into the forest, his eyes narrowing as he tried to see.

“I’m back,” Draco said irritably, stepping into the clearing. He looked just as tired as he had at the beginning of the year, the circles under his eyes recarving themselves like they’d been waiting to creep back in.

Harry thought about saying that he’d missed him, but he didn’t think that would go over very well at all, so he just settled on nodding.

“What are we even doing here?” Draco asked, throwing his arms out and striding toward Harry, who was still sitting on the ground. He had a bit of a stomp in his step, like however the forest had managed to conjure him up, he wasn’t happy about it.

“Haven’t a clue,” Harry said, looking up at the slowly shifting branches above him. “Well, I guess I have a few theories.”

“Care to share with the audience?” Draco asked, his voice clipped. He had a peculiar way of breathing when he was upset, his breath catching and hitching in his throat and then rushing out in a gust. Harry couldn’t remember him doing that before.

“I really think she wants us to be friends,” Harry said, still feeling silly about it even as he said it. “Maybe even real life friends.” Draco looked stricken, and Harry shrugged, trying to brush it off as a minor fancy. “I don’t know, it’s just an idea.”

“Quite an idea,” Draco replied snippily, running a hand through his disheveled hair. “I just want to sleep.”

“Me too,” Harry said. “Maybe that’s it. We’re just supposed to sleep again.”

“Seems like an awful lot of trouble,” Draco said, and then sighed. “The kissing is a strange side effect.”

Harry almost laughed at the absurdity of the conversation, and could barely picture how real Draco would turn up his nose at even the notion. He wondering what kind of overdramatic performance real Draco would put on at even the prospect of kissing Harry, or the kind of performance he would have put on when they were both younger. Maybe he’d just shrug now, do that delicate thing with his shoulders and pretend it didn’t bother him.

“Not truly an averse one, really,” Harry said, sneaking a look at Draco’s face. He’d gone particularly still, and seemed to have forgotten how to inhale altogether. “You alright?”

“Quite,” Draco said, fussing at his robes. “Quite alright.” He had a soft rosy flush to his cheeks, and it gave Harry no lack of joy to know that that probably meant that real Draco flushed when he was embarrassed too.

“You’re blushing,” Harry said, and it came out with the first flashes of a brittle smile, like they’d stumbled onto something close to an inside joke.

“I most certainly am not,” Draco shot back, his flush going at least one shade deeper.

“You are,” Harry said, watching the way he moved, all nerves and sharp angles. “Why do you think we’re here then?”

“I don’t really want to play games right now,” Draco said tiredly, turning around with a flip of his cape. He was in his neatly pressed school uniform, the pajamas he sometimes wore conspicuously absent.

“Just making conversation,” Harry said, trying to sound apologetic but erring a little on the petulant side.

“You’re not very good at it,” Draco said, still facing the other side of the clearing.

“Draco?”

“What, Potter.”

Harry didn’t answer for a moment because he hadn’t quite thought of anything to say. He watched the back of Draco’s head, almost hoping that Draco could feel the prickle of his eyes there. “I think you’re good company.”

“I think you’re absolutely lousy company,” Draco replied without missing a beat, startling a tired laugh from Harry’s lips. “What’s so funny?”

“You’re so deliberately difficult sometimes. I feel like every single night I have to figure you out again.” Harry said, a wry grin twisting across his face. Draco in hiding, Draco hidden under layers of pretense and trying so, so hard. “What’s actually you?”

“Guess you’ll never have the privilege of knowing,” Draco said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

“It’s just the forest,” Harry said, deliberately goading. Not mean this time, more curious. All the unwieldy feelings he’d spoken to Ron about gushed forward in a messy landslide, turning and wheeling in his chest. Draco Malfoy looked pretty in the forest glow and he was unhinged and serious and kissed with a desperate fervor; those were some of the only facts Harry could get his hands on. “You don’t have to pretend here. You can be anything you want.”

“When are you going to get it through your head,” Draco said, his voice going tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled taunt and waiting to snap. “That I have never once been able to be anything I want.”

“But what about right now? This second, what’s stopping you?” Harry said, watching Draco shiver as each of the words hit his back. He looked as if he might be unspooling somehow.

“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Draco said with a quiet sort of fury.

“I think I know more than you’d like,” Harry said, because it sounded good in his head and he wanted to believe that. Wanted to believe that maybe he and Draco understood each other at this point.

“Well now you’ve asked for it and you’ll see how you like it.” Harry wasn’t prepared for Draco to whirl around and close the distance between them, dropping to his knees in front of Harry and crashing into him with a kiss that sent Harry falling backwards. Draco grabbed a fistful of his hair to keep Harry from ending up on his back, their limbs hitting awkwardly against each other. Harry swam through the confusion into an abrupt state of wakefulness, realizing that whichever Draco this was, under all his layers, was a desire to kiss Harry.

“Kiss me back,” Draco hissed, tugging Harry closer, giving Harry just enough time to pull his glasses off during the next reprimand. “Surprised? And you were so sure you knew everything.”

Harry almost replied, but was cut off by the return of Draco lips, insistent and warm. Harry felt it again, that tidal wave of something that was more electric than ‘like.’ It made his hands shake again, but unaccompanied by the familiar rattle of anxious nausea. He tried to steady them by holding onto the fabric of Draco’s robes, pulling him closer in the process.

“Don’t you think we should-” Harry started, half kissed, half bemused. “Talk about this?”

It was only the last word that made Draco stop, a sneer on his mouth. “Whatever you’re going to say, spare me.”

“But like, should we be-” Harry cut himself off this time by pressing his lips briefly back to Draco’s, cursing their magnetism. “Doing this? After all of our history?”

“I should think our history would make it quite apt,” Draco mumbled, his mouth pressed to the stubble growing on Harry’s cheek. “Who fucks better than enemies?”

“I just don’t know if this is a good idea,” Harry said, almost like a question, a last breath of logic left on his lips. He wasn’t sure about the implications of getting off with a mirage. He wasn’t sure about the implications of getting off with Draco. Once again, he found himself unsure which one was worse.

“You’re the one who said we could do anything here. None of this is fucking real, Potter, it’s not fucking real, you said so yourself,” Draco replied, a frantic edge breaking through his drawl. Harry had the overwhelming sense that he was fighting himself, that he wore thin in different places so different selves could peek through. Harry pulled him in tighter like he was trying to prove him wrong with the feel of his body, the huff of Draco’s breath on his cheek warm and humid and real. “This is what I want to be, I’m sorry you don’t like it.”

“That’s not what...” Harry trailed off, his eyes closing so he could try and think. He knew what he wanted, but it was never going to be as simple as that. He thought Draco was trying to convince him that if it wasn’t real then it didn’t matter, even though that sat so wrong in his stomach. Just because they could be anything between the trees didn’t mean it wasn’t important, that it didn’t change him. Even in mirage it mattered to him.

“Harry, look at me,” Draco said, insistent and pressing his forehead hard against Harry’s. His words were staccato and undercut with a boiling hurt that Harry knew too well in his voice, too well not to try and kiss away. “Do you want me?”

Draco’s breath on his cheek, the smell of his aftershave and the clean smell of his skin, his body curled around Harry’s like he was trying to become him. Harry thought of the emptiness that used to follow him around like a cloud, the one that seemed to eat away at any desire but couldn’t touch this one, couldn’t begin to erode at how much he wanted them to consume each other.

“Yeah,” Harry said, letting himself sag into Draco’s body.

“That’ll be enough for now,” Draco said, and Harry felt the ‘for now’ ring deep in his bones but he kissed Draco so he wouldn’t have to think about it, kissed him so deep that he could pretend he was real, that he was the only thing that was.

Harry let his eyes close, falling back into the rhythm they’d found days before, with Draco tugging on his messy hair and Harry with his hands balled up in the front of Draco’s robes. The adrenaline rushing through him made it feel like a fight and he poured all of his restless energy into the kiss.

He wondered if he could pour everything into it, all of his fucked up desires into the press of his hands and the knife sharp need to be cared for into the drag of his bottom lip.

His memory couldn’t have done justice the feeling of another body pressed against his, Draco breathing heavy against his own stumbling breaths. He almost smiled at Draco’s fingers twining in his hair, the same mess of curls he’d claimed to hate so much. The irony was delicious.

Real Draco must kiss like this, he thought, everything sliding together and then out again. He couldn’t have known, was only taking shots in the dark, but it felt like a truth when it came to him.

Real life prowled with beady eyes in the darkness between the trees but Harry squeezed his eyes shut and tried to let himself just be, gave himself this moment and the feel of another body. Draco pressed him back against the ground, crawling on top of him with calculated insistence and there was nothing but that, only Draco pouring back into him.

Harry fussed with the fastener on Draco’s robe, pulling it off until he was only in a button up and trousers. So many pristine layers and Draco clutching at him with an almost violent fervor, breathing hard into his mouth.

Harry thought about pushing him back and helping him undress, slowly removing every piece of clothing until it was just Draco in the glow of the trees. The intimacy of the thought drew a small sound from his lips, one that Draco chased with his tongue, and Harry forgot about anything that would mean that they had to stop kissing.

Harry worked at the buttons on Draco’s shirt, his fingers slipping against the fabric until his tie was loose around his neck and his shirt hung open. He reached up past the hanging fabric, running his hand over the skin of Draco’s chest. He could feel every breath Draco took, the frantic beating of his heart against his palm.

He was so caught up in the warmth of his skin that he barely noticed that they’d stopped kissing, their mouths pressed against one each other as Harry explored Draco’s body with his hand. He could feel the shake of Draco’s biceps as he held himself up, the clench and unclench of the muscles in his torso.

Harry mumbled something, maybe a swear, maybe praise and Draco collapsed against him, a desperate half moan breaking from his lips as he kissed him, more slowly this time, their lips just brushing.

“Take your shirt off,” Draco whispered, sitting back up and staring down at Harry with a trembling patience. Harry complied, pulling the gray fabric up over his head and shivering as the breeze hit his chest.

“Lovely,” Draco murmured, running his hands across Harry’s chest, his thumbs running over Harry’s nipples. The smallest of smiles alit on his lips when Harry squirmed and pressed up into the drag of his fingers, his hips jerking upward involuntarily “So lovely.”

Harry felt enough words to spoil it on his lips, requests for Draco to tell him it was real, asking him to say it was anything more than it was, just a body and a sideways reconciliation. He reached up towards the back of Draco’s neck instead of saying any of them, pulling him down for another kiss.

He hadn’t thought they could find a way to kiss deeper, but it felt deeper still, with Draco’s palm on the bare skin of his shoulder and Harry leaning up to meet him, running his hands up the back of Draco’s shirt.

Draco ground down against him with a quiet moan, his cock hard against Harry’s thigh. Harry reached around Draco’s arse, pulling him up so they fit together, rolling his hips up so his cock slid against Draco’s.

“I want-” Harry said, words almost beyond him. He buried his head the crook of Draco’s neck, trying to even his breaths as Draco rocked against him, driving him into the velvet soft ground. He wished he could feel Draco’s skin, wanted to feel Draco’s hands on his cock but didn’t want to stop long enough to ask.

Draco’s breath echoed loud in his ears, his skin warm and growing tacky with sweat, real and solid and overwhelming. Lovely, Draco had said, with a casual sort of approval that drew a moan from Harry’s lips even in memory.

He thought Draco was lovely too, caught on the intensity in his eyes and the bare skin of his neck and his long fingers, but he was beyond saying it. Draco would probably snarl at him if he did, so he focused on the feelings building in his stomach and tried to feel all of Draco at once.

Draco rocked against him, his breath coming in quick gasps that rang in Harry’s ears like the rustle of the branches. He smelled slightly herbal, like some kind of nice soap that was almost familiar. Harry could feel his magic surging like it did whenever he was about to come, and tried to pull Draco more tightly to him to try and feel the thrum of his magic too. He could find it when he focused, the low hum of foreign power washing towards him, sparking and warm and beyond them.

He tried to hold onto it, beyond their mouths and their bodies and felt it raw and clean under his fingers, wilder magic than he’d ever known, tangled and twisted and needy as soon as he felt it. It wanted to tow him in and eat him up and he felt his own magic tug back at it, try to touch and tame it and sink deep inside it all the same.

Draco’s magic curled around him, searching him out and wrapping him up and Harry tried to do the same as he moved his hips to meet Draco’s thrusts, which were quickly growing frantic and quick. He grit his teeth so he wouldn’t moan, desperately rocking against Draco until he felt his orgasm pull over him. He tensed, coming with a broken gasp as Draco thrust against him a few more times before stilling, his lungs heaving.

Draco lowered himself slowly onto Harry’s chest, his arms resting on the ground and his chin hooked over Harry’s shoulder, rising and falling with his own breathing. Harry himself barely dared to breathe, just stared up at the waving branches and tried to temper his mounting hysteria.

Looking at Draco was confusing and stupid enough without knowing exactly how his body tensed when he came and how the twisting beautiful signature of his magic felt when it pushed against Harry’s. He tried to tell himself that nothing that happened in the forest mattered but the refrain sounded hollow even in his own mind. It mattered, it mattered more than it should and Harry was panicking even as he tried to calm down, felt his heart jackhammer as every reality snuck out from between the branches and found him.

He’d never be able to face Draco again, not after the sounds he’d made, the way he’d clutched at his shirt and pulled him closer. He’d imagined all of that, had wanted it in some sick part of him. He knew it was wrong, knew Draco would be disgusted, perhaps even past the point of amusement and to a mere haughty up tilt of his nose and a sneer.

Draco stirred against him, cuddling closer to his body and Harry felt a sharp rush of guilt that almost read as pain. “I can feel your heartbeat,” Draco said, and it sounded more mildly concerned that anything else. He voice was stretched out and languid, stripped down in that moment. “You’re shaking.”

“I know,” Harry said. “I can feel my blood pumping in my ears.”

“When you said you were scared of things, I didn’t really believe you,” Draco said, still slow. Harry was aware of every part of his body, of the uncomfortable wetness in his pants and the sweat sticking on the back of his neck and everywhere else Draco touched him. Draco seemed to be half drifting out of the world. “I think I get it now.”

“Great,” Harry replied in a puff of breath.

“You’re not too broken to be wanted,” Draco said, his voice muffled against Harry’s skin. Harry almost thought he wasn’t supposed to hear it or that he was supposed to pretend that he didn’t.

Harry nodded, unable to find sense in any of it, in Draco or in the mirage, in the forest or what she gave him. Maybe it was the truth because the forest told him, maybe it was the truth because Draco did, or maybe it was a lie meant to patch him up and make him a little less sad.

“Can I ask you something?” Harry asked, trying to press his hands against Draco’s back so they wouldn’t shake.

“I think you’re about to,” Draco replied, still slow and sleep heavy.

“But can I?” Harry pressed.

“Yes.”

“What are you scared of?” he asked, remembering the first night when Draco had been soft, when he’d read the book aloud and held Harry’s hand even if he pretended he didn’t. This almost felt like that Draco or something close to it, less guarded and more tender. “Other than snakes.”

Draco hummed, sounding vaguely disapproving. “No easy questions with you. No, ‘what’s your favorite color, what foods do you like.’ Straight to ‘what’s your boggart?’”

“You know mine,” Harry replied, that petulant edge encroaching on his arguments. “It’s only fair.”

“Merlin forbid something isn’t fair,” Draco said, and even without the edge in his voice he still made Harry’s words crumble. The silence between them filled with the swish and rustle of the forest and Draco breathed in very slowly. “It’s not really snakes.”

“Okay,” Harry said, moving his hand just the smallest bit across Draco’s back. He had tiny dimples there, two dips just above the waistband of his pants and Harry wanted to press his thumbs into them.

“It’s like, it’s unpredictability. If I don’t know what’s going to happen, I can’t breathe,” his breath hitched to punctuate it. “There’s other stuff. I still wake up terrified mother has been murdered. That the Dark Lord is back.”

“He won’t come back,” Harry said, wishing everything else was just as provable. “I promise.”

“I was there, I know,” Draco said, sounding almost frustrated. “It’s not rational, it doesn’t have to be.”

“I know,” Harry said, memories of sleepless nights still fresh in his mind, of running over everything wrong with him like a checklist when he got too tired to refute himself.

“I know you do,” Draco said, sighing and pushing himself up on his elbows so he could stare down at Harry. He was a blur of blonde hair and gray eyes and Harry squinted up at him. “I always kinda assumed you’d wear your glasses when you fucked. I thought it was kinda like, your thing.”

“You assumed?” Harry asked.

“It crossed my mind, just now,” Draco replied, but it sounded like a cover up and Harry let himself fall back into the fantasy that Draco wanted him, that maybe all versions of him did at least a little. “I’m going to tidy up,” Draco said, and it only sounded a little like a deliberate subject change as he sat up, retrieving his wand and casting a quick cleaning spell.

“Should I do you too, then?” Draco asked primly, wand held loosely in his hand.

Harry nodded, feeling the rush of now familiar magic wash over him.

“You’d never trust me to do that,” Draco said, putting his wand away and brushing his hair back out of his face.

“I would,” Harry replied, wanting to kiss him again but afraid the moment had passed, now that he was crawling off of Harry and buttoning up his shirt.

Draco shook his head but didn’t argue, adjusting his tie.

“Are you going somewhere?” Harry asked, still lying down on the velvet ground, still shaking, still wishing for more.

“Yes,” Draco replied, folding his collar down with practiced hands. “Can’t stay here forever, can we?”

“I guess not,” Harry replied, retrieving his shirt and pulling it over his already messy hair.

“You’re still shaking,” Draco said, reaching out a hand like he might offer it and then pulling it back.

“Yeah, I do that,” Harry replied, wringing his hands like if he did they might stay still when he stopped. They never did.

Draco reached over, taking both of Harry’s hands in his own. Harry almost snatched them back, the scabs on his fingers horrible and so close to bleeding. Draco hummed in the back of his throat as he held them, looking down and then raising one of them to his lips, pressing a kiss at the place where Harry’s nails met his fingers.

“Goodnight,” Draco said, dropping his hands and standing abruptly like he’d finally pulled himself out his trance.

“Will you be back tomorrow?” Harry asked, trying to sound like he didn’t care, like it didn’t matter. If what mirage Draco had said was true, about things that weren’t real not mattering, then maybe real Harry wouldn’t have such a large pit in his stomach. As it was, he almost wanted to wrap his arms around Draco and not let him fade back into the trees.

Draco nodded, looking like he didn’t trust himself to speak, almost like he was about to cry, almost like something worse.

Harry nodded back, watching as he picked up his cloak and walked swiftly out of the clearing, the woods filling in behind him until there was nothing left of him but the barely lingering smell of herbs and the remnant crackle of his magic.

xx

“There has been much speculation in the magical world as to whether or not the Forbidden Forest can be classified truly as flora, or if the forest’s arguable sentience and occasionally detectable pulse would make it something much closer to beast. Due to issues regarding the functionality of recording devices in the Forbidden Forest, this pulse has never been officially recorded, but, as Greg Beecham of the Salem Academy of Magic was quoted in his famous 1989 essay, “I can assure you that I felt the pulse of the forest with my own hands, I simply had to press my palm to the bark or the ground and there it was, approximately 30 beats per minute by my inexact calculations, about half the speed of a human heart.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, Newt Scamander  
xx

Draco slept well that night, though he was sure, when he woke up the next morning well rested but plagued with guilt so intense it knocked the wind from him, that it was by the good grace of the forest alone. It was a disaster and he’d been expecting it, but it still burned white hot in his brain.

When his feet hit the floor he choked in a breath and knew without a doubt that the rest of the day would be like swimming upstream.

“You look like you just saw death,” Blaise said when he swept past him, a towel tied around his waist. “Nightmares?”

Somehow, Draco felt that ‘yes’ wouldn’t be a complete lie. “Not in the traditional sense.”

Blaise looked sympathetic, fussing a bit with his braids even though they already looked perfect. “You slept though?”

“I slept,” Draco said heavily, pulling himself out of bed and retrieving a clean uniform. The one from the previous night had been shoved unceremoniously to the bottom of his laundry hamper, although he’d briefly considered more dramatic options along the lines of burning it.

Blaise hummed some tune Draco had heard him play on piano, Greg still snoring softly in the last full bed. Theo had left much earlier, always preferring to get homework done before breakfast, leaving only Draco and Blaise awake.

“You can talk to me about whatever’s going on, you know,” Blaise said, dabbing on cologne.

Draco made an incredulous noise, pulling on his pants with a frown. “There’s nothing to talk about, and besides, you’re the most dangerous gossip I know.”

Blaise perked a bit at the compliment, before becoming serious once more. “I wouldn’t tell if it was like, really bad, you know.”

“I love you, Zabini, but I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you,” Draco said, wishing even as he said it that he had someone to tell, someone to unload all the horrible secrets onto so he didn’t have to carry them alone. That said, if he could barely keep his mouth shut about it, he had no illusions about how anyone he chose to confide in would react.

Blaise pretended to look offended, though he knew his reputation as well as Draco did. “Fair enough. How about I tell you something about me, barter system style? Then we both have something on each other.”

“You really want to know, don’t you?” Draco asked, pausing with his tie half tied. “Why do you want to know so much?”

“Because you don’t want me to know,” Blaise replied. “If it was just sleep, you’d tell me. And no one knows where you go at night, not even Pansy.”

Draco scowled. “Tell yours first. And I’m not telling you all of it.” His breath hopped and he thought about backing out. “And if your secret isn’t good enough you’re not getting anything from me.”

Blaise laughed. “Salazar, you’ve really gotten up to something haven’t you?”

“You have no idea,” Draco snipped, giving his tie an irritated tug into place. He cast a final longing glance at his bed, knowing that hiding under his covers forever wasn’t an option. He couldn’t just keep hiding, it wasn’t sustainable. Still, the idea of leaving his common room to face Harry, real and solid, made it impossible to breathe.

He’d been stupid, letting the forest get under his skin like that. He wanted it not to matter but he could still feel it, the feel of Harry’s hands and his breath and the strange whirling of his magic. He was so good at shoving things back into the dark corners of his brain where they belonged but he still felt wretched, still wanted to go back to the forest and kiss Harry again.

“Okay - and I’m being dead serious here so you can’t laugh at me - I asked Luna out and she said no,” Blaise said, looking faintly embarrassed even in retrospect.

“She really said no?” Draco asked, feeling as if he should have been more shocked by this piece of information. Certain things were having trouble making contact, and all he could think about was how Harry would react to Draco asking him out. Just the thought of it made him vaguely nauseous, though he knew Harry would just think it was a joke, that he was making fun of him. Maybe he’d figure out that Draco meant it and do that awful pity thing he did so well, stammering as he backed away with his friends.

“Really said no. Nice about it too, said she didn’t date people,” Blaise said, eyes finding the carpet. “I don’t know, I thought she was cute. Interesting girl, you know?”

“She is, yeah,” Draco said tiredly, wondering how much to give up in return.

Blaise nodded, leaning back on the bureau as he waited for Draco to talk. Greg was still fast asleep, his quiet snoring making everything seem just a little less dire.

“I hooked up with someone I really shouldn’t have,” Draco said slowly. “Really, really shouldn’t have.”

“That where you’ve been sneaking off to at night?” Blaise asked, having the tact to look serious.

“Basically,” Draco said, rubbing the bridge of his nose and trying not to hyperventilate. “I should stop but I can’t.”

“Why do you need to stop?” Blaise said.

“Because there’s literally no outcome that doesn’t mean...” Draco stood up as straight as he could, watching the top of the door so he wouldn’t have to look at Blaise. He didn’t know if he could say it, if it was too much to admit. “I get hurt no matter how it ends.”

Blaise nodded seriously. “So you have feelings, they don’t?”

It was much closer to ‘I have feelings, they don’t even know its happening,’ but that was so impossible to explain that Draco just nodded.

“Sure you can’t make them fall in love with you?” Blaise asked, trying to be teasing.

“Not likely,” Draco said bitterly. A hippogriff would probably have a better chance with Harry than he did.

“Shame,” Blaise said. “What are you going to do?”

Draco shook his head, hands knocking against his thighs. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Blaise said. “You could always get people to fall in love with you, even when you were a poncy little brat. Merlin knows why.”

“Not helping,” Draco replied grouchily, as Blaise continued to get ready, shoving a few quills in the outside pocket of his bag.

“I haven’t known anyone you set out to charm who didn’t eventually come around,” Blaise said. “Remember when Durmstrang came to visit? I thought a few of those boys were going to transfer.”

Draco’s lips quirked up at the memory, even as the other half of Blaise’s comment sank deep into the darkest parts of his heart. “And if only that first bit was true,” he said, picking up his bag with a huff. “Let’s go to breakfast before I give up and go back to bed.”

“Good,” Blaise said, stopping by Greg’s bed to rip his covers off and give his hair a muss, startling him out of sleep. “Wake up, you’ll miss all the eggs.”

They headed out to breakfast as Greg fumbled his uniform on, knowing he’d catch them at the table. Blaise began to hum again, letting Draco stew for the duration of the walk. It was a nice sentiment, Draco thought, that he could somehow charm Harry, after he’d failed so incredibly at it the first time.

It wasn’t like they’d work anyway, not as lovers and probably not even as friends. Potter had the shortest fuse he’d ever seen and Draco didn’t know how to back down from anything. Even in the harlequin light of the forest Draco was just as close to screaming at Harry as he was to kissing him, and the light of day never made that any better.

The tables were crowded when they walked in, but Draco’s eyes still found the top of Harry’s head immediately. His hair was just as mussed as it had been when Draco had left him the night before, and while he felt the expected wave of irritation, it was accompanied by the intense sensory memory of the way his hair felt soft under his hands.

Maybe it wasn’t like that in real life, Draco reasoned as he took a seat, pouring himself a cup of coffee and spooning in a generous helping of sugar. Glancing over at Harry again, he felt unpleasantly certain that it was.

As he stared, giving his coffee an irritated stir, Harry glanced straight at him, his eyes widening when they met Draco’s. Draco kept his face blank, even as his emotions ran rampant.

Harry stared defiantly back at him, narrowing his eyes like he was trying to prove something and Draco wondered what had gotten into him. He couldn’t quite manage the quiet morning stare they’d perfected for the first few weeks, but at least he had an excuse. Potter was just being weird, as usual.

The day passed slowly, Draco fluctuating between ‘calm and collected’ and ‘on the verge of blinding panic’ when the reality of his situation rushed back in. Every time he so much as glimpsed the forest outside of a window he felt something drop out from underneath him, and the smell of treacle tart at dinner sent him so close to hyperventilation that Pansy started petting his hair to try and calm him down.

When night came and he finally slipped out, Blaise shot him a dirty grin that Draco didn’t have the energy to return. He thought telling someone might make him feel better but it just made him feel stupid, having someone else know that he was having his heart broken, like a month long operation gone wrong. He wanted it to be over, to pick himself up off the operating table and start healing, but he didn’t want it to stop, even though it felt like being cut open, like having someone reach inside his chest and squeeze. It felt like that, but it was still being touched.

He wore his school uniform instead of his pajamas, retying his tie as he walked out into the chilly November night. It made him feel a little more in control and less strange, even though he suspected it would be off soon enough. The thought made him shiver more than the breeze did.

The forest felt strange that night, exuberant and bright as she rolled a path out before him. Shimmering spiderwebs hung heavy from the branches, catching in a silver light that Draco couldn’t find a source for. He looked up at them uneasily, hoping he wouldn’t spot any spiders in their overlapping strands.

The undergrowth rustled as he moved and a few mouse sized creatures ran across the path. It should have been creepy, but it just felt instead like old halloween decorations left out for him to find.

There was something spicy in the air, like cinnamon and cumin and one of the smells from the lake, still warm and familiar. He wondered when Harry would come and couldn’t begin to think of what he would say to him, not after what they’d done, not after the way that Harry had triggered something soft inside him.

“Are you enjoying this?” He asked the forest, resting a hand on the smooth trunk of a nearby tree.

The forest laughed at his tone, the undergrowth rustling in amusement. She was enjoying it, loved pushing them together and watching them play off each other, guarded and unexpectedly vulnerable. She could feel them piecing themselves slowly back together under the watchful arms of her magic, fighting her and each other and anything they could get their hands on.

She drew Harry closer to the place where Draco stood, giddy to see what they’d do this time, her two favorite boys lost in the forest. She knew they couldn’t do it forever but she wanted them to, to draw them back in each night and build new worlds for them to play in. She’d keep them, if they wanted, let them roam the paths forever, but some part of her knew that while they might have wanted that once, they would no longer stay.

Draco reached up to skim his fingers across a low hanging bit of spider silk, listening for the familiar sound of footsteps. He knew if he stood still and waited long enough Harry would arrive, walking slowly out of the undergrowth with messy hair and a look of surprise.

“Didn’t think you’d be back,” Harry said, his voice floating up from behind him, no footsteps forewarning his presence.

“Couldn’t stay away,” Draco said, nearly flippant as the line of spiderweb gave a little under his fingers.

“Me neither,” Harry replied, almost amused, like they were joking around. Maybe they were, Draco almost wouldn’t be surprised.

Draco didn’t turn to face him, pressing his fingers through the web until it broke, fine silvery strands drifting down to land on his cuffs.

“Are these are spiderwebs?” Harry asked, coming up to stand beside him and reaching up to touch the delicate weaving.

“Fine observation skills,” Draco said, reaching a bit higher and pulling a bit more down. “No spiders around though.”

“Thank Merlin,” Harry said with a shiver, watching Draco fuss with the spiderweb but not reaching for it himself. “Big spiders in this forest.”

“Plenty of monsters in this forest,” Draco said. “I think if we were going to get attacked we’d have crossed that bridge quite a while ago.”

“I agree,” Harry said, still looking wary. “Doesn’t mean spiderwebs don’t give me the creeps.”

A memory of the cellars in Malfoy Manor drifted back to him, stark in all their dark and dripping glory, hanging thick with spiderwebs so thick and established that even his mother’s crisp spellwork was barely able to clean them out.

“Reminds me of the cellars,” Draco murmured, almost hoping Harry wouldn’t hear.

Harry looked over at him in alarm. “Your cellars had spider webs like this?”

“Sometimes worse,” Draco replied, trying to make it sound airy. Even though the forest shrouded him in protection and Harry was barely anything more than a dream he couldn’t fight the urge to try and be blasé. “I was never sure how they got so bad.” His mouth quirked up at the side, overwhelmed by the sudden urge to spill all his memories. “Used to be too scared to go down there. Any time mother would try and send me down there I’d track down a house elf instead.”

“No surprise that you lived in a literal haunted house,” Harry said with a laugh, looking critically up at the artful tangle of silk. “Used to get spiderwebs in the cupboard I lived in.”

“Cupboard makes it sounds so dramatic,” Draco said, sure that though Harry probably hadn’t grown up in a bedroom quite as sprawling as the one of his own childhood, everyone must have been exaggerating. He’d always wanted to ask him about it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you asked a boy who didn’t speak to you in anything other than insults.

“It was a cupboard,” Harry said, sounding like he was trying to sound offhand too. It was the kind of nearly depreciating comment people made when they were trying to pass off secrets as polite conversation. “Under some stairs. Dudley used to wake me up in the morning by stomping over my head.”

“Sounds like a git,” Draco said, though as someone who had once stomped Harry’s nose in, he wasn’t sure he was in a place to comment.

“A proper one at the time,” Harry agreed. “I got a bedroom eventually. They were right scared of me once I implied that I could hex them half to hell.”

“No magic outside of school, Potty,” Draco teased, though not as unkindly as he intended to. Harry had a strange kind of fire in his eyes that spoke of insurrection and revolution and Draco felt the infectiousness of it under his fingernails.

“Not that they knew that,” Harry said, sounding ever so smug.

“Harsh words for a muggle lover,” Draco said, mostly to see how Harry would react.

“Wasn’t about them being muggles,” Harry said levelly, almost like he knew what Draco was trying to do. “Not sure you’d understand, your parents loved you.”

“They did,” Draco said, even though his parents’ love for him hadn’t come close to saving them. Maybe it had only been meant to save him, and he wondered how they’d feel about their success.

He thought Potter would have been justified with some mean quip asking him how it felt now, his being an orphan or practically so. Draco already knew the guilt of it, a fire hot and insidious, after teasing Potter for his dead parents and Longbottom for his crazy ones. Now he had one of each, and at least their parents had gone that way nobly.

Harry said nothing of the sort, just stared at him with an almost compassion in his eyes. “I’m sorry about your mum.”

“Sorry about yours,” Draco said, looking down at Harry’s hands instead of his face. Something washed through the forest at this exchange, something that felt like a long warm sigh.

“What do you think that was?” Harry asked, looking up at the gently swaying branches, the movement making the spiderwebs glitter like water did under moonlight.

“Approval,” Draco said, reaching out to touch tree bark, suddenly certain. He could feel, just under the bark, just beyond the physical presence of the tree, the pulsing magic of the forest. It felt almost familiar somehow, like it was a fun house mirror of his own, like they were almost kindred.

“She likes it when we get along,” Harry said, placing his hand next to Draco’s on the tree. Draco felt, in the twisting currents and ropes of the forest’s magic, another foreign pulse from Harry’s hand. It was the same spark and fire that he’d felt when they’d kissed, so different from the tangled magic of the forest. Harry’s felt more pure somehow, more like liquid gold or the rippling strength of the fire that burned at the center of the Earth.

Slowly, a thought occurred to Draco, a half formed question that drifted uselessly at the back of his brain, almost realized, even before the proof had begun to manifest.

The thought had not occurred to Harry as he pressed his hand to the bark of the tree and felt only wild magic against his fingers, strong and mischievous. The low pulse of it brought him back to the night before, all the forest’s power rushing up to meet him like he was what it had been waiting for.

Harry’s guilt and shame over the encounter couldn’t seem to dull the shine of it, how it had seemed to promise him with every breath that he was capable of feeling. He didn’t know if he could carry that conviction from the forest, but he thought the boundaries would be porous enough to let him and his healed wounds out the other side.

Draco was looking at him, focused like he was trying to untangle a knot. He dropped his hand from the tree bark and pressed his fingers against Harry’s forearm, firmly like he was hoping to find a pulse.

“Are you uh-” Harry trailed off, unsure how to ask if they were going to do it again, if Draco was going to kiss him and make it easy this time or if they’d have to fight their way into it.

Draco nodded, a proud tilt to his chin as he curled his fingers around Harry’s wrist. Harry wished he knew how to read him better, both this Draco and all other versions. He’d begun to like the idea that this was the real Draco, swimming to the forest in dreams he’d forget in the morning, that if given the inclination and right situation he’d really be like this. Any other explanation threw into harsh reality the knowledge that he was trespassing on Draco’s body and pouring himself into a projection of a boy who didn’t do much more than stare at him over coffee.

Harry was waiting for the sudden movement, for Draco to break and kiss him quick like he always did, but he just held Harry’s wrist, that strange look on his face. When he finally did move it was slow like he was trying not to spook him, his mouth finding Harry’s neck and pressing a careful kiss there.

He hovered at the skin before opening his mouth and sucking, gently at first but then with a deliberate kind of insistence, like he was taking special care to mark him.

“Are you sure that’s-” Harry started, reduced to gasping as Draco bit down harder, before drawing back and kissing Harry on the mouth like an apology.

“Just the forest, doesn’t matter,” Draco said, and Harry hoped that meant the marks would fade in the morning light of his dorm even though they hadn’t last time.

“Not sure that’s how that works,” Harry said, and Draco gave him a dark look, something desperate in his eyes.

He reached for Draco’s tie, resting his hands on the knot until Draco gave him a nod. Harry avoided Draco’s face as he undid the buttons of his shirt and slid first the cloak and then the button down from his shoulders, letting them drop to the forest floor.

The air had gone more humid, swirling and warm, the ground not quite as rough as it had been before. Harry could feel their actions already slipping into routine.

Draco wasn’t quite as delicate as he’d been when they were younger but he’d never lost his effeminate build, his chest lean and narrow even after all his Quidditch training. They both had seeker’s bodies, light and awkward with sharp angles and long lines.

The unforgiving curves of the dark mark were clear, no longer covered by the always rolled down sleeves of his uniform. Harry surveyed his pale skin, the veins and unevenness of color, and the long scar splitting his chest at the breastbone.

Draco didn’t speak, just stood very still as Harry reached out to touch him, tracing his finger down from the hollow of his throat down to the waistband of his pants along the scar tissue. Draco’s ribs shuddered under the touch and Harry didn’t know if it was from fear or desire, and wasn’t sure how to ask.

He wanted to say something about Draco’s body, something that could possibly mirror the way Draco had called him lovely in a moment of distraction but the words didn’t seem to come. Harry pressed closer, sliding his arm over Draco’s shoulders and tugging him closer, gratified when Draco let himself be pulled into a kiss, his fingers curling around the soft parts of Harry’s hips.

It felt so real, every bit of skin warm and soft underneath his hands. In the daylight it hadn’t seemed so dire, touching another person and knowing it wasn’t any better than his imagination.

He tugged Draco closer, trying to kiss him harder to see if he could find some place he might flicker out of existence, somewhere he wouldn’t ring so true. He hoped for that, some break in the illusion so he wouldn’t be able to delude himself into thinking it was real.

Draco kissed just like he did the night before, shining with wild magic and grasping hands. Without the ground to catch them, Harry had to hold them tighter together, his grip on Draco frantic as he unbuttoned his pants and slipped his hand inside, gratified by the sounds Draco made into his mouth as he touched him. It was like the night before, except that the quiet moans from Draco’s lips hadn’t been so tied to his own sloppy movements, to Draco pushing into his hand and shuddering against his body like Harry was the only thing holding him up.

Harry pressed against him, rubbing his cock against Draco’s thigh as he jerked him off. He was vaguely worried they’d tumble over, neither of them in possession of enough of their faculties to stand.

Draco fussed briefly with the fly of Harry’s trousers before giving up and palming his cock through the fabric, his fingers desperate and sure as Harry lost the ability to kiss him and bent his head to rest it on Draco’s shoulder instead.

He could feel dangerous words on his lips, proclaiming things he didn’t even entirely mean, words about love and affection and begging Draco not to leave even though they were still tangled up together. He hoped the forest could feel how much he needed him, needed her as well, that she would always bring both of them back together until he was alright again.

Draco clutched him tight when he came, fingernails digging into Harry’s skin and a moan leaving his lips that brought Harry after him, though he’d been trying to stretch the moment a little longer.

“Didn’t even have to properly touch you,” Draco whispered, sounding ragged. “Merlin.”

Harry pulled his hand out of Draco’s pants, unsure what to do with it. He thought maybe he was supposed to let Draco go, but he was terrified that if he did Draco would slip into the fog.

Draco glanced down, looking quietly amused at Harry’s distress.

“Let me clean us up,” he said, pulling his wand from his pocket and casting the spell with a hand that only shook a little.

“Thanks,” Harry said, awkward all over again. In the aftermath, all his half-dreamed thoughts of affection seemed so childish and improbable, since it was Draco and they didn’t get along, since it wasn’t Draco and it was just the forest.

Draco nodded, the arm he’d slung around Harry’s waist resting there like something poisonous. Harry found himself running his eyes over the imperfections on Draco’s body, all the places his veins ran blue under his pale skin, the messy bits of scar tissue and the cruel whorl of the dark mark.

His own body bore its own scars from the war and it was a warped kind of comfort to see them reflected back on another boy.

“Gruesome, no?” Draco asked, pressing his thumb against the skin of the dark mark, hard enough to make the snake shift on his arm, casually like he was used to abusing the spot.

“Yeah,” Harry said, watching the way the snake slid back into place, almost three dimensional even though it couldn’t be.

“It’s fading,” Draco said, frowning down at it. “Very slowly, but it is.”

“Mines still as dark as ever,” Harry said, gesturing up to the lightning pattern on his forehead that skittered up to his hairline. “Kinda thought maybe it would disappear when he died.”

Draco reached up, his eyes determined as he swept Harry’s hair off his forehead and traced the lines with his fingers, not quite gentle but not hostile either. Harry wasn’t sure he’d ever been touched there before, if anyone had ever been brave enough to reach up and feel the marred evidence of his first brush with death.

“Does it feel like you thought it would?” Harry asked, brave under Draco’s fingers.

“Yeah,” Draco said, smoothing his fingers one more time over the half numb skin before letting his hand fall. He took a small step away from Harry and sat down daintily on the forest floor, staring up at him with an invitation in his eyes.

Harry stared at him in confusion for a moment before following him down, somehow feeling that it was the right thing to do. Draco didn’t move when Harry sat as well, no part of them touching, just the forest breathing slowly around them, waiting for one of them to say something.

She leaned down closer to them, sending through a breeze that smelled like the first night, like roses and lakewater and bright winter air and sage and treacle tart. She made the ground just a little bit softer, made the spiderwebs glimmer softly in the low light of her trees

“Are you going to stay?” Harry asked, looking up at the trees so he wouldn’t have to look at the boy next to him. He dug his fingers into the soft earth, pleading with the forest to let him stay, to let him have one more thing.

“Yes.”

Harry lay down on the forest floor and stared up at the canopy, listening to Draco’s breathing beside him as he did the same.

“I read another muggle book,” Draco said, voice floating up into the air. It reminded Harry of being in the dorms with the Gryffindor boys, of talking past lights out as they gazed at the scarlet of their canopies.

“Did you like it?”

“The main character was a miserable prat,” Draco said.

“What did you read?” Harry asked, feeling an uncomfortable twist at Draco’s words even though he suspected that he was trying.

“The Catcher In The Rye.”

Harry didn’t think he’d read it but could remembered Hermione talking about it in passing and vaguely recollected that it was supposed to be that way. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to like the main character.”

“I did like him,” Draco said. “He was just a miserable prat too.”

“Oh.”

“You should read it.”

“Okay.”

The forest darkened slowly and for a panicked moment Harry thought that the forest was about to wash them away from each other once more, but she only hummed a low song that sounded like a lullaby.

Harry became vaguely aware of snakes circling around them, long bodies in the undergrowth coming in slow circles. He felt no fear, only the sure warmth of protection as they took laps around them like scaly sentinels.

It felt permanent, not in that the moment itself it could last forever but that the imprint of it would, that it would stick on his brain like a scar from that night on, seared into permanence on their skin.

They fell asleep like that, not touching and laid out on the forest floor, and each woke during the night to find that they’d curled around each other. When they woke, each pretended they hadn’t and curled closer, riding back into the fog of pleasant dreams.

Just before morning light, the forest pried them from each other with sad arms and regretful breaths, because she knew if she let them wake tangled, they would be impossible to rend.

xx

The ‘forest’ part of the Forbidden Forest, new research suggests, may be slightly misleading. Renowned herbologist Jasmine Winthrop on her most recent research expedition, has discovered under the forest a vast, interconnected root system that stretches close to two miles into the Earth’s crust. Even more fascinating, is her deduction that the roots are not those of separate plants, but of a enormous clonal colony grown from one original tree.

Andrienne Joseph, Secrets of Herbology  
xx

Harry prodded the bruises on his neck in the bright morning light of the bathroom, his feet cold on the tiles and a terrified twisting in his stomach. He’d tried to spell them off, even resorting to stealthily sorting through the skeevy magazines under Seamus’ bed in hopes that he’d be able to find something to help.

It seemed, unfortunately, that they were immune to spellwork, and remained blotchy, purple and enormous on the skin on his neck. He traced the outline where Draco’s teeth had been, the memory of his eyes as he’d leaned in sharp in Harry’s brain. He thought that real Draco would be amused by this at least, to know that Harry would have to spend the entire day fussing with his scarf to keep them covered. Draco would probably laugh at him, which was stupid, since he was sleeping with someone and Draco wasn’t. It didn’t really matter, because Harry wasn’t actually sleeping with anyone.

He cast one last irritated spell, sighing when the magic refused to even fade them. He snuck back into the dorm, casting nervous looks at his sleeping roommates before coming to the side of Ron’s bed and shaking him awake as quietly as he could.

“I need your help,” Harry said when Ron finally blinked his eyes open, shushing him when he started to protest and pointing at the huge marks on his neck.

Ron’s eyes went wide and then amused, sliding out of bed with a grin and following Harry to the bathroom.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Ron let out a cackling laugh. “What the fuck kind of dementor gave you that?”

Harry scrubbed at the spot with ill humor, remembering with uncomfortable clarity the time that Draco had dressed up like a dementor to try and terrorize him. It seemed especially damning that of all the people to make him feel anything it was not only the only person he couldn’t have, but someone he knew it was idiotic to even want.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Harry said, leaning up against the sink. “I can’t get it off, none of the spells are working.”

Ron tried to stifle his laughter, twirling his wand in his fingers. “Out of practice, then?”

“Shut up.”

“The savior of the wizarding world defeated by a hickey, Merlin, Rita Skeeter would shit,” Ron said, pulling himself together to get a closer look. “Your friend has sharp little teeth.”

“I’m aware,” Harry said grumpily.

“Oh I’m sure you are,” Ron said suggestively, waving his wand with authority as he mumbled a spell. He repeated the incantation, his smile only slipping the third time it failed to work. “Well that doesn’t usually happen. Are you completely sure you’re not kissing a dementor?”

“Not entirely,” Harry said, looking over at the mirror to inspect the damage. He was worried about his scarf covering it, Draco had placed it irritatingly high. He had the feeling the forest hadn’t invented that bit, it seemed like the sort of irritating shite Real Draco would do too.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with you sneaking out, would it?” Ron asked mildly, examining the bruise with clinical fingers before rummaging in one of the medicine cabinets.

Harry debated not answering it at all, but thought that, beyond being rude, his silence would probably would say all it needed to. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“Are you hooking up with the Forbidden Forest?” Ron asked, a teasing lilt to his voice, and Harry nearly choked at how accurate his jest was.

“This is a fucking disaster,” Harry said instead of replying, leaning up against the sink with a grimace and squeezing his eyes shut. “Why isn’t the spell working?”

“Couldn’t tell ya,” Ron said, pulling a little bottle from the cabinet and pouring a bit of the tincture onto a cotton ball before swabbing it on Harry’s neck. “This might help.”

Harry caught sight of the label, which read ‘Borneo’s Miracle Bruise Cure,’ and did not feel overly comforted.

“Is there a chance whoever you’re hooking up with made them permanent?” Ron asked, the cotton ball stinging, especially as Ron pressed into the bruise with increased fervor.

“Wouldn’t put it past them,” Harry said tiredly, thinking both of Draco and the forest. She had always been kind to him and he didn’t doubt that she wanted to make him happy, to heal him and keep him safe but she was mischievous in a way that made him nervous, even after he had come to trust her.

“You gonna tell me who it is?” Ron asked, pouring more of the liquid on the cotton ball and swabbing at Harry’s throat.

“You don’t want to know,” Harry said, guilty even though nothing good would come of telling anyone of what he was up to. Even if he really was hooking up with Draco, it would be a disaster. Since it was just him out in the forest, it was even worse.

“I really do,” Ron said, squinting at the bruise. “This is some dark fucking magic.”

“What’s dark magic?” Dean asked, pushing sleepily through the door followed by Seamus, who was holding Dean’s hand and looking excited to be awake.

“Nothing,” Harry said firmly, slapping his hand over the bruise on his neck and cursing himself for not locking the door. He’d thought Ron would have been able to spell it off, hadn’t been so pessimistic as to think he’d be stuck with the biggest bruise known to man on his neck all day.

Dean accepted his answer as he tugged Seamus over to the sink to brush his teeth, but Seamus leaned in to inspect both his neck and the bottle Ron had been holding, which he was doing a bad job of shoving back into the cabinet.

“Harry, do you have a hickey?” Seamus asked innocently, leaning against the sink.

“No,” Harry tried, not moving his hand and attempting to look innocent. It was without a doubt, a losing game.

“You do,” Seamus said, his eyes going wide and excited. “Let me see.”

“Don’t harass Harry,” Dean said around his toothbrush, reaching out to poke Seamus in the side.

“I’m not harassing him,” Seamus said, giving Harry an appraising look. “I’m congratulatory, jubilant even, for Harry and his new hickey.”

“Harassing,” Dean repeated, as Ron stifled a giggle.

“Please don’t spread it around,” Harry said, lowering his hand with a sigh. “No one’s supposed to know.”

Seamus choked on a laugh at the bruise mottling Harry’s neck, trying to smooth his face into something supportive. “Good luck t’ya, mate.”

“Thanks for trying to help, Ron,” Harry said as he trudged back into the sleeping area, sick with the suspicion that no matter how tightly he wound his scarf, everyone would know by lunchtime.

As it turned out, quite nearly the whole school did know by lunchtime, except for Draco, who didn’t know anything for sure, because he’d been too anxious to leave his room until five minutes before his first class of the morning.

He’d felt vaguely ill from the moment he’d left the forest in the dawn light, maybe even from the moment he woke up outside of Harry’s arms. He still couldn’t fathom it, that the truth might be that it really was Harry, that he’d been pulled into the forest just as Draco had. It seemed incredible that he hadn’t considered it until that night, the possibility that they were both lost in the same place. He’d been so convinced that Potter could never feel anything for him that he’d never once considered that Potter must think the same sorts of things.

He wasn’t even entirely sure what he’d do if it was Harry, if real Harry and forest Harry were the same one. All the whispers and kisses they’d shared didn’t change the fact that they were irreconcilably different, that Draco wanted to scream at him, that Harry didn’t listen and was reckless and assumed more than anyone Draco had ever met. All of those things, while insurmountable, didn’t change the way that Harry had kissed him, that Harry had touched him and then come back.

He was making his way down to the Great Hall for lunch, nerves twisting in his stomach like tiny snakes, when Pansy accosted him with a brilliant light in her eyes. “Draco, you will never guess what I heard in Divination.”

“I’m not in the mood for gossip, Pans,” he said, letting her take his arm as she steered them toward the great hall.

“You’re in the mood for this,” Pansy said confidently, her acrylics digging into the fabric of his shirt. “So I heard from Padma, who heard from Parvati, who saw at breakfast, that Harry Potter has a hickey the size of a bludger on his neck and no one is claiming ownership.”

Draco opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and then opened it again, trying to find some point of mooring to anchor himself to. Pansy had turned to look at him, eager for his input, but he couldn’t seem to form words.

She frowned, looking at him too closely. “What is it?”

He opening his mouth to say something, anything, but only hitched in a breath that tripped into another until he was hyperventilating.

“Oh no,” Pansy said, dragging him by the arm until they could push their way into an empty classroom. “Deep breaths, darling, please.”

Draco nodded, clutching her hands and closing his eyes and trying to breathe like a normal person. He thought of Harry and his bloody fingers and the way he shook and his conviction that he couldn’t be loved and tried to find calm.

Minutes stretched past and he memorized the patterns on the tiles and counted in his head and pushed reality into boxes so it wouldn’t run wild in his brain.

“There, that’s fine then,” Pansy said, squeezing both his hands. She was using her business voice but her eyes were soft and concerned. She looked moments from scooping him up into her arms and carrying him off somewhere where she could take care of him and he wanted it a little bit. “What happened?”

Draco shook his head, shutting his eyes again. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Draco, it’s me,” Pansy said, frowning. Her bangs were falling into her eyes but she didn’t drop his hands to push them back. “You haven’t had a panic attack in weeks.”

“It’s not really a panic attack,” Draco said testily, examining the clean line of her haircut instead of looking her in the eye.

“Does it sound better to you if I say ‘I mention Potter to you and suddenly you forget how to breathe?’” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

The question felt like such a tremendous understatement that he barely even knew where to begin. “A lot.”

“Okay,” She said calmly, still holding his hands.

He could see that he was hurting her by keeping everything held inside but he thought if he said it, knowing what he knew, he wouldn’t be able to hide from it anymore. He wasn’t even sure if he could hide from it when it stayed locked up in his own chest.

“Pansy, I can’t tell you,” he said, deadly serious and tremendously sorry.

She searched his face, maybe for clues and maybe for a crack, something she could dig her fingernails into looking for secrets. “Will you ever tell me?”

“Maybe not,” Draco said.

“Is it about Potter?” she asked, his given name sounding strange in her mouth, like she had to try not to spit it.

He nodded, hoping he wouldn’t spill the rest of his guts on the floor too.

“Merlin, when isn’t it,” she said almost spitefully, dropping one hand to finally brush her hair from her face. “Come on, let’s get you to lunch.”

He nodded, standing before she could pull him up and straightening his shirt. So he’d fucked Harry. So he’d fucked him. So he would go back into the forest that night and do it again. So he would tell him secrets he’d never told anyone and read muggle books so maybe he could begin to understand. So he’d put all of it in a box labeled ‘fragile’ - so when school was over he’d seal it up tight.

“So who do you think it is?” he asked, cool and impassive, small smirk, arm looping through Pansy’s, one hand tapping suggestively at his own neck.

“Potter’s new girlfriend?” Pansy said, looking a bit wary but letting him take the conversation back to familiar ground.

“Granger maybe?” Draco asked ponderously, locking his heart tight, not thinking, only performing. Once, he had been very good at it. “Wouldn’t surprise me, neither of them have much taste.”

“Maybe it’s Weasley,” Pansy said with a nasty laugh. “Wouldn’t that be a trip.”

“Merlin I can’t even think about it,” Draco said, his stomach twisting unpleasantly at the thought, his face schooled into calculated displeasure.

Pansy laughed, tipping her head back and leaning into him. Draco wrapped his armor tighter around himself, letting himself be dragged into the Great Hall where Harry sat with all his friends, shame pooled deep in his stomach.

Harry almost hadn’t come to lunch, or breakfast for that matter. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to being the talk of the school, positive or negative, but he felt as if his secret world was coming down around him, all the boundaries he thought he had in place blurring out.

Hermione had been upset with him earlier, looking disbelieving when he said that even Ron didn’t know who it was and that he couldn’t tell her. He thought her reaction might be worse than Ron’s if he told her, though he knew both of them wouldn’t take to it. They had more than enough reason to hate Draco, and if Harry was honest, so did he.

He couldn’t explain to them that Draco was trying, that he wasn’t so hateful anymore, that Harry couldn’t explain most of his attraction in the first place. He was beginning to wonder if sleep was worth all this, if the way he was getting better in some ways was ruined by the way Draco was tearing him apart.

He looked forward to the forest and he dreaded the inevitability of it, how every minute that passed seemed to almost physically push him toward it. The day slipped by in an embarrassing haze and by the time the sun had dipped below the horizon he had once again accepted where he’d end up.

He gave Ron a weak wave as he left, Dean and Seamus whispering after him as he let the door shut and made his way slowly to the forest, feeling like a man walking again towards his death but also to safety.

The forest could feel his slow approach and the drag in his step and reached out to him with her warm breezes, trying to tell him that he shouldn’t hurt like this over a boy, over love. She knew she couldn’t help him, that he’d have to realize it himself somehow. She could feel Draco following close behind Harry, footsteps quick and sure on the grass as he strode through the dark.

It was only because she could see into all the mysteriously labeled boxes inside him that she knew he was scared too.

She welcomed both of them in with arms heavy with fruit and small ponds they could dip their feet in, leading them slowly towards one another again. They’d nearly met when she felt another presence on the edge of the forest and stopped, feeling out what was new until she was sure exactly who had wandered inside with a wand and a deep turbulent love.

The forest pushed a small grove of flowers up around Hermione’s feet, laughing when the witch stopped walking with a start. Hermione reached down to touch the flowers, her fingers gentle on the petals, and the forest appreciated how careful she was. The forest remembered her, all petulance and stubbornness, and admired her brutality, her particular brand of bravery.

The forest breathed a hello, a welcome back, and Hermione looked up at the trees, frowning like she almost understood. The forest rained flower petals on Hermione’s head and made a decision, almost laughing at the fun of it as she led Draco slowly towards her.

Draco made his way quickly through the forest, past the low hanging fruit and the warmth, his heart in his throat. The day had slipped by in a queasy rush of Harry and speculation and the constant checking of his watch before he finally slipped out. He could feel terror, the emotion familiar and metallic at the back of his throat. He’d gotten the knowledge he wanted even if it made the whole thing a deception. He knew Harry should know, but also that they’d only slip out of the forest unscathed if he didn’t. It was too late for Draco, but maybe not for him.

When Draco saw the figure through the trees he almost called out, assuming it must be Harry in the field of flowers made just for them. He quickened his step, breaking into the clearing only to find Hermione staring at him with a peculiar look on her face.

“Granger,” he said almost accusatorially, and she squared her shoulders at his words, recovering herself with impressive speed.

“Malfoy,” she said, not aggressively but with a certain amount of wariness, like he was a wild animal or something worse. “You’re not-”

He wanted to talk over her, to stop her from coming to the conclusions he knew she’d come to, but in the floral lightness of the forest and the depth of the night he couldn’t come to excuses fast enough. He gaped at her, reduced to pleading only with his eyes, hoping that when she arrived at the truth she’d be gentle.

She stared at him in that piercing way she had, her dark eyes glinting in the phosphorescence of the forest as she fit all the pieces together. “You’re here for Harry.”

“So are you,” he replied, schooling his face into impassivity, like he could bluff his way out.

She pursed her lips and he wished he could read her better. She wasn’t trying to punch him, which he would have deserved after everything. If he believed that the forest was conjuring people up for him to reconcile with, she wouldn’t have been a surprise.

“I don’t quite believe I am,” she began, still standing very quietly. “In the way that you are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, before any other responses could come to mind. “I’m really sorry.”

“For?” she asked. There were pages of things, novels worth, that he could apologize for and he wasn’t sure his hubris or time would ever allow for all of them to be touched.

To tell her that he was sorry he couldn’t stay away from him seemed like too large a confession but he needed to apologize for something, one of the infinite things that were still wrong between them.

“For my Aunt Bella,” he said, the one that rang truest and most heavy with blood.

She blinked at him for a moment like he’d surprised her, reaching self consciously for the dark skin of her arm, the one that they’d cleaned of scars but had to still twinge with the word it once carried. “Alright.”

“And for the things I said about you,” Draco added, even though she was something foreign and beyond him. She was still a better witch than he’d been a wizard, still more worthy of Harry. He thought maybe that had been some of why he’d always found it so easy to hate her. “And to you.”

“Why?” she asked, the furrow in her brow growing deeper the longer he talked, like it did in class when she didn’t understand the lesson just yet. There was an ironic amusement in finally being able to stump her. “Why are you apologizing?”

“What else is left?”

“I don’t know,” she said, a sadness in her eyes. She seemed to be searching for something to say, looking around at the flowers and the foliage like they’d give her answers. “Are you two-” A pause, scuffing her school shoes against each other. “In love? Do you love him?”

The last two weeks flashed bright and hazy in his brain. Harry, appearing to him asleep in a bed of flowers. Harry, holding his hand. Harry, lips warm and insistent. Two years prior in a bathroom and bloody. Three years and a curled lip and flashing eyes. Seven years and two small boys who didn’t know any better. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know what I can call it,” Draco said, bleeding out with honesty. “It’s only been two weeks.”

She stared at him like she was seeing something beyond her comprehension. “I don’t understand.”

“He doesn’t know,” Draco began, stilted, unsure how to convince her to keep his secret with him, to protect Harry, to protect his heart. “He thinks I’m part of the forest. A hallucination.”

“You’re tricking him?” she asked, horrified.

Draco shook his head frantically. “I thought he was a mirage until this morning, I promise. That’s what the bruise was about. I wanted to know for sure.”

“Well now everyone knows,” she accused, her voice just tipping into unhappiness.

“They don’t and they won’t. No one would guess,” he said, that certainty keeping him a clammy sort of comfort. They might suspect unrequited affections of him, of the disgraced Malfoy boy but never Potter, never Potter tangled up in such a mess of love. “Not even you would have guessed.”

“Are you going to hurt him?” she asked after a pause that even the forest couldn’t adequately fill with her soft breeze and slowly falling flower petals.

“No,” he said. “If he never knows it’s real, he can walk away unscathed.”

“You’re not going to tell him.”

“No.”

She nodded, a protective glint in her eye. “Take care of him please.”

“I’m trying,” he said, feeling like she’d taken a small bit of his torn up heart, like she’d looked at it with her sharp eyes and deemed it something better than rotten.

“Then I won’t tell.” It looked like it was paining her, the secret already tugging at the frizzy ends of her hair but he trusted her because he could see she felt the weight. “He’s been better since he started coming here. That’s what matters to me.” She smiled at him, fragile like night blooms. “Goodnight, Draco.”

“Goodnight, Hermione,” he said, and watched her turn on her heel and leave the forest behind.

He watched the path close up behind her and waited in the flowers for Harry just as Hermione had waited for him. Hermione, who he’d underestimated, who’d treated him more justly than he deserved.

“Hey.” Harry’s voice drifted through the forest and he turned, his breath hitching but not out of control. Harry appeared like he always did; in his ragged pajamas with his hair a mess, old sneakers on his feet. The bruise on his neck showed up sharp in the forest light and Draco felt a faint glimmer of pride in it.

“Nice hickey,” he said, affecting something of his old swagger, trying to get Harry to play along with him, trying to forget that everything was so dire.

“Yeah, thanks for that,” Harry said irritably, giving him a scowl. “Everyone thinks I’m a tart.”

“Are you not a bit of a tart?” Draco said, though he’d been the one to kiss Harry the first time, though all of the following was probably his fault too. Not that Harry hadn’t been a fully willing participant.

“I’m not! I’ve only dated two people,” Harry said, looking affronted that Draco would suggest such a thing. “You’re the one who gave it to me, how does that make me a tart?”

Draco shrugged, watching the lines of Harry’s arms and the quirk of his mouth and resting in the familiarity of it. This was really Harry, the one he’d known all his life, real and solid in front of him, letting himself be teased. “I don’t make the rules.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I think you say that about rules you’ve made up.”

“Not that you can prove anything,” Draco said, a ghost of a smile on his lips.

“I’ll start keeping track,” Harry said mischievously. “Better start watching your mouth.”

“Oh so that’s how it is,” Draco replied, his heart rate speeding up at the suggestion in Harry’s voice. He felt vaguely victorious to know that real Harry wanted him, not one of the many pretty girls who Draco sometimes saw watching him and whispering. He couldn’t brag about it, would never be able to walk around the school with Harry at his side, but the worst parts of him took cruel pleasure in knowing he was the one people were jealous of. “Saint Potter’s here, can’t get away with anything.”

Harry laughed like it was an inside joke of theirs, reaching down to pick one of the flowers and turning the stem in his hands. “I thought about not coming back tonight,” he said, lightly like he wasn’t dropping a bomb. “It freaked me out that people might know. It’s a bit crazy, the whole thing.”

“Oh,” Draco said, unsure what to say, remembering that he was supposed to be a mirage, even though he understood. “Why’d you come?”

“I’ve been crazy before,” Harry said. “Coming here makes me feel better.”

Draco thought that agreeing might give him away, but he wanted to so badly it hurt. “The forest knows how to fix things.”

“You’d know,” Harry said wryly, looking almost sad when he met Draco’s eyes.

“I guess I would,” Draco said, his voice almost breaking. Knowing what he did, he could see how they’d spoken in doubles all the times before, convincing themselves that they were just talking to pieces of the forest instead of real boys. “How do you think you’ll know when you’re fixed?” They’d pretended each other was real before, it shouldn’t be any different just because one of them was.

Harry shrugged, the leaves waving slowly above his head. His hair was messy but it had a bit of its old shine back, not sad and frizzed up above tired eyes. He looked better and Draco wondered if looking was all of it. Draco wanted to cut him down the middle and see if he looked better on the inside. “I guess I’ll know when I am.”

“I’m tired of not being better,” Draco said, because he’d been healing for months and now he was hurting all over again. He thought for someone who’d lived through a war and held secrets from the Dark Lord himself, he should be better at keeping his heart safe, or at least that loving shouldn’t hurt so much.

“Me too,” Harry said, and Draco wanted to kiss him again, wanted to wrap his arms around Harry’s shoulders and just be there, be not better with him until maybe they became better, or something close to it.

“Can I ask you a question?” Draco said, something strange stirring in his chest like a possibility.

“I mean, yeah,” Harry said.

“When you go to Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor, what flavour of ice cream do you get?”

Harry blinked at him, looking like he wasn’t sure whether it would be appropriate to laugh. “Like, my usual order?”

“Yes.”

“Strawberries and cream,” Harry said, smiling like they were telling secrets. “What do you get?”

“Earl gray and lavender,” Draco said. “I haven’t ever had anything else. Pansy thinks it’s bollocks, but its my favorite.”

Harry did laugh this time, a little uncertain. “I’m not surprised, really. Kinda pretentious.”

“It’s ice cream, how pretentious can it be?” Draco scoffed, crossing his arms. Somehow, pretending to be mad at Harry was almost as easy as really being mad at him.

“You’ve found a way,” Harry said seriously. “Is it my turn to ask a question?”

“If you want,” Draco said, pretending it didn’t feel so important. He just wanted to know about Harry, wanted to steal all the small mundane pieces of him while he could. They’d never been friends like he’d wanted, he’d never been able to go to the ice cream shop with him and watch him order or laugh at him as he dripped ice cream down his fingers. He wanted to know everything, every small thing about him so maybe when they left the forever he’d have something left to hold on to.

“What’s your music guilty pleasure?” Harry asked, smiling like maybe he actually cared back.

“The Weird Sisters’ first album,” Draco answered immediately.

“I don’t think I’ve heard their first album,” Harry said, his brow furrowing.

“Probably because it’s objectively terrible,” Draco said, smiling over at him. “You’ll have to go and listen to it.”

Harry laughed and promised he would, his retort bleeding into Draco’s next question as the forest held them careful and loved in her arms, feeling like she’d finally shoved them together in the right way, finally found the places they hurt and stitched them up again.

They fell asleep among the flowers in the early hours of the morning and when they woke apart at the edges of the forest the tiredness didn’t hang from their bones the way it used to. Draco recognized the feeling from the sleepovers of his youth and smiled all the way back to the Slytherin common room. Harry thought it felt a little like his first year at Hogwarts: all blurry eyed tiredness and the warm memories of friends close by.

It wasn’t until Draco sat down to breakfast the next morning, rested and in turmoil, that an unfamiliar owl dropped a letter on his plate. He opened it, finding an unfamiliar scrawl with a message that could only be from one person:

What about you? Do you get to walk away unscathed?

He dug a quill from his bookbag, scrawling a quick answer and re-attaching the letter to the owl’s foot before his housemates could comment. His response read: No.

xx

The 5 Strangest Things That Have Been Lost In The Forbidden Forest  
5\. Seventeen snitches in Hogwarts history have flown into the Forbidden Forest instead of staying on the playing field.

4\. Ron Weasley and Harry Potter once reportedly lost a muggle car in the Forbidden Forest.

3\. Fifteen cows brought to the Hogwarts grounds for a petting zoo wandered into the forest one night and were never found.

2\. Mexican herbologist Alicia Garcia went missing in the forest for one year in the depths of the forest and upon her return, refused to write anything concerning her disappearance.

An entire Quidditch team. The 1976 Chudley Cannons reportedly went missing in the forest for two weeks while visiting Hogwarts for recruitment.  
An article in the September 6th, 1996 issue of Daily Prophet by Tanya Wiseall

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Harry thought, sitting on the grass with Hermione and Ron after class, that it wasn’t really that surprising that Draco’s favorite flower was white roses or that he didn’t know what a refrigerator was or that he was really terrible at cooking, but all the new pieces of information he’d learned the previous night still felt precious and unexpected.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Hermione, her feet laid across his middle and her head against Ron’s chest. It was quite nearly too cold for this sort of thing, but it was the last warm snap of the Fall and they’d wrapped themselves up in all the sweaters and scarves they could dig up and Hermione had brought a thermos of cider out from the kitchens.

“Just stuff,” Harry said, giving her his best smile. He had thought upon waking up, with a violent sinking in his chest, that maybe all of the strange and important things that Draco had told him the night before weren’t even real, that’d he’d made them up in his own head. Since then, he’d talked himself into believing that even if Draco wasn’t real all the things he said still could be, secret knowledge stolen from him while he slept. It felt almost disingenuous and he knew Draco would never have told him any of it, wouldn’t have smiled and said he always got earl gray and lavender ice cream, even though Harry could picture it like it was a memory.

“Stuff?” Hermione asked, looking dubiously down her nose.

“School,” Harry clarified, and Hermione still looked like she didn’t believe him.

“Well that’s a first,” Hermione chided.

“I am!” Harry protested, even though it was the farthest thing from the truth.

“If you say so,” Hermione said doubtfully, and Harry felt a little bad at the truths he was keeping from her. He’d let enough slip to Ron, too much probably, and now the whole school knew he had a secret lover of some kind. It would be fair of her to be upset. “You’ve had a lot on your mind lately.”

“I’m not daydreaming about my secret lover, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” Harry quipped, reaching out to tap on her sleeve so she’d know he wasn’t really mad.

She made a small choking sound at his words. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

“Only because everyone is thinking it,” Harry said, because he’d heard from Ginny, who was taking great mirth in his predicament, that most of the school had talked of nothing else since it had happened.

“Well I’m not the one who’s staring at the clouds with a grin on his face,” she sparred back, sparking a laugh from Ron.

“That’s a fair point,” he agreed, and Harry scowled at their taking of sides.

“It’s a beautiful day, aren’t I allowed to smile?” Harry asked, even though they all knew he’d been caught out.

“You’re allowed to smile,” Hermione said, not sounding as repentant as she could.

“And we’re allowed to pester you about who you’re fucking,” Ron said, tossing a leaf in Harry’s direction with a cackle. “Best friends are so important.”

“Bugger off,” Harry said, yanking up a handful of grass and throwing it over Ron’s head.

“I’m sure we’ll meet them when you’re ready,” Hermione said, laying off on her pressuring for the moment.

“Can’t I just have a fling?” Harry asked, hoping the word sounded as light as he intended, even as his entanglement with Draco was anything but. He wasn’t sure any of his interactions with Draco could ever be described in such light terms.

Hermione hummed like she knew something Harry didn’t but chose not to reply, and the conversation shifted back to winter plans and finding shapes in the clouds. The afternoon spooled away from them and by the time they made their way back to the castle it was nearly dinner time, the sun starting to dip behind the Forbidden Forest.

Hermione split off to go to the library for one final book, Ron tagging along with her, probably to try and kiss her in the stacks. Harry made a slow trek up to the Gryffindor Common Room, pinwheeling wildly between the soft, careful joy of being with Draco in the forest and the poisonous truth of all of it, that it was fake and temporary and not real love.

It was in this way that he almost didn’t notice, through a courtyard window, Draco sitting outside on a bench wrapped in a thick winter cloak, his head in a book. Harry stood at the window for a long minute, watching the wind tousle Draco’s hair and smiling at the ruddiness of his cheeks. Harry wanted to know what he was reading, why he was sitting out here alone in one of Hogwarts’ overgrown courtyards when he could be inside, causing trouble with his friends.

Harry couldn’t quite map the changes in him, both his strange lack of hostility sometimes and his overt ignoring of Harry, to the way he’d yelled at him last time Harry crept up on him alone. Harry wondered if maybe it would be different now, if he could sit next to Draco and probably try to talk to him, try to draw him out. Maybe it was a selfish desire, like if he could make Draco like him in real life it wouldn’t be so awful to kiss him in the forest, wouldn’t be such a breach of trust.

He pushed open the doors, cringing when they creaked and Draco looked up to see him, his eyes going wide at Harry’s entrance. Last time Harry had tried to ask him how he was, he’d pushed back. He thought that maybe if he just acted normally, like they were friends, it would be okay.

“Can I help you?” He asked, shutting his book and holding it to his chest like he was protecting himself and also like he didn’t want Harry to see it.

“I just saw you sitting alone,” Harry said casually, trying not to spook him. “What are you reading?”

“None of your business,” Draco said, his eyes wide and alarmed. He looked terribly cold, and Harry wanted to lend him a blanket or chide him over his lack of warming charms.

“Is it smutty?” Harry asked, wanting to kick himself as soon as the words had left his mouth.

Draco looked as if Harry had suggested something absurd and completely terrifying. “No!”

Harry tried to look properly sorry. “Just joking.”

Draco blinked up at him, looking uncomfortable and distressed on the old rickety bench. The trees in the courtyard had dropped much of their leaves, only a few red and yellows stragglers remaining on their branches. Harry wondered what season was Draco’s favorite. He hadn’t asked him the night before. He wondered if real Draco and forest Draco would say the same thing.

“So what are you reading?” Harry asked, kicking at the toe of Draco’s shoe with his trainers.

“You’re going to scuff my shoe,” Draco said, pulling his feet back from Harry. “These aren’t sneakers, you know.”

“I barely tapped it,” Harry said, still smiling. Draco looked vaguely upset with him and he was still clutching his book protectively to his chest. Harry wondered at the thickness of his shell, at the thought that maybe Draco truly didn’t want anything to do with him. “It’s getting chilly out.”

Draco looked like he was on the verge of a retort, before schooling his expression into careful coolness. “You’re quite right Potter, I should be going inside.”

“Don’t leave because of me,” Harry said. Draco was already gathering up his robe and buttoning up his coat, causing him to drop his book in the process. Harry swooped down to pick it up, turning it to try and read the cover. “What’s this?”

“None of your business,” Draco replied, snatching the book from Harry’s hand on the last syllable. “Goodbye, Potter.”

Draco swept out of the garden, the door swinging shut behind him with a definitive bang, leaving Harry to follow him back into the corridor with a sigh on his lips. He wished he knew at least why Draco was so hell bent on ignoring him. He didn’t even pick fights anymore or try to antagonize Harry. It wasn’t that Harry would rather have fought, he just thought it strange that they couldn’t even manage that.

Maybe Draco genuinely wanted nothing to do with him. Maybe Draco didn’t carry the spark of their fights and history in the corner of his heart like Harry always had. Maybe Draco didn’t want Harry in his life and they would be better off ignoring each other. It seemed incomplete, like after everything, all the real things and everything in the forest that had only been Harry’s, they should have deserved more.

The leaves rushed in lazy whirls around his feet and he knew in the darkest places of his heart that if real Draco didn’t want him he couldn’t keep going into the forest and kissing him. He wouldn’t have wanted that, Harry knowing all the secret pieces of himself, Harry figuring him out, Harry with his hands on Draco’s body. Harry realized with a sick twisting in his stomach that if he was pretending to care about any version of Draco, then he’d have to stop.

Harry knew he’d have to go one last night, to make his peace and tell the forest he loved her, that he was thankful, that he was healed enough to go home. Walking the long way back up to the common room he wasn’t sure if he was, but he was better than he’d been before, some old scars healed up and disappeared even as he felt lovesick and torn apart inside.

He felt sadness sick in his stomach, proof that he could feel again, proof that he wasn’t floating alone through the fog anymore. With conviction he told himself that if he could love the mirage of Draco Malfoy he could love someone else, someone real who would want him back, someone real who would be good for him.

After dinner he went back into the forest with a crushing sense of deja vu, walking to some kind of death through darkness. The weather was snapping back down close to freezing, Harry’s nose chilly against the wind and his breath curling and smoky in the night.

It had barely been more than two weeks in the forest and yet it felt both like it had taken years and like he’d only wandered in yesterday. He felt like he’d uncovered a world since then, uncovered a boy he’d never known and patched up his tired body. He thought maybe he should be angry, angry for knowing he should stop and angry at Draco for refusing to be real and refusing to love him but the ending had always been inevitable. No one, especially not him, could exist in the filmy embrace of the forest forever. It had always been transitive, always a temporary home.

The forest welcomed him like she always did when he crossed over into her borders. She was just a forest tonight, no flowers or strange breezes and he was sure that she knew what was to be done.

“Thank you,” he said, touching the bark of an old tree, no longer afraid to speak to her. She sighed back and he knew she was telling him that he was welcome, that he would always be welcome.

He wandered through the woods, a path failing to present itself like she wasn’t guiding him this time, like she didn’t have magic greater than his and he had to choose his own way through the trees. The forest was dark without the phosphorescence of her leaves or the soft glow of bugs and Harry lit the way with his wand, feeling like he had come back to the beginning and back to the end. He wondered with a jolt of fear if Draco would even come or if Harry’d broken the illusion with his decision to leave.

“I’d like to say goodbye,” Harry murmured, knowing she could hear even the lowest whisper, the quietest beat of his heart. “If that’s fine.”

The forest made no effort to respond and Harry wandered on, nearly tripping over stray branches, remembering the swinging light of the lantern the night of their detention, the real Draco small and terrified of the dark. They’d been together in the forest once and maybe it was poetic that some version of them was together in the forest again.

Harry’s feet began to hurt in his shoes and he regretted wearing only his pajamas as the chill of the forest began to creep in. He cast a warming charm and kept going, wondering how deep in the forest he was, wondering how long it would take him to get out.

He was beginning to worry when in the distance, he saw an unsteady light blinking through the trees. He didn’t call out, just moved steadily towards it and hoped quietly that it was who he thought it must be.

“Did you miss me?” came Draco’s voice floating through the trees, strident and almost wavering like it was both a tease and a real question.

“Yeah,” Harry said, climbing over a log until they were face to face, light up by steady wandlight.

“Oh,” Draco said, like he hadn’t expected it.

“I just wanted to say goodbye,” Harry said, forcing himself to look at Draco’s face, forcing himself to know it wasn’t really him.

“What?” Draco asked, something in his eyes betrayed, something in his casual demeanor beginning to break already. Harry had hoped he would have known, that being a creation of the forest would have meant that mirage Draco would understand why he had to leave and would kiss him goodbye one last night. He hadn’t thought he’d have to explain, that maybe mirage Draco would miss him.

“I’m not coming back,” Harry said, trying to make it sound like an apology. “I thought you knew.”

“I didn’t,” Draco said, sounding prim and frantic. “Why are you leaving, why now?”

“Because it’s not fair,” Harry said. “You wouldn’t like it, the real you.”

“What do you mean?” Draco asked, starting Harry down with gray eyes that didn’t say anything.

“In real life you hate me,” Harry said, wishing that all of his arguments didn’t seem quite so weak in the dark. “It’s not okay for me to be doing all this with you, even if-” He stopped, tried to collect himself. “It’s not fair for me to come here and kiss you if the real you doesn’t want to kiss me. It’s not fair to me or you.”

“It’s just the forest,” Draco said, sounding pained in his repetition. “It doesn’t matter if it’s only in the forest.”

“Of course it matters,” Harry said, the truth shattering all the pretenses he’d put up, all the pretending he’d done. “What happens in the forest matters in real life. I can’t just kiss you and then go home and have it be okay. I still carry it. I carry it everywhere, I can’t just have it not matter.”

“Do you wish it was real?” Draco asked, the shaking of his hand making the light quaver. His breathing was wrong and Harry was sorry he’d never been good at compartmentalizing, was sorry that everything ran together.

“It is real,” Harry said, shrugging his shoulders. “If I learn your secrets here and I kiss you here it’s real to me, even if it’s just a dream. And the real you, the real you has no idea and that’s not right. None of it’s right.”

“But do you wish it was really real,” Draco said, his voice hitching and Harry had the feeling he was watching the mirage break apart before him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harry said, because in the end Draco would never want him, because there wasn’t a place for them anywhere that wasn’t in dreams.

“It does,” Draco said, as firmly as he could. “Would you want me if you could have me? The real me?”

“I can’t!” Harry said, rushing slowly towards anger, to something like despair. This was supposed to be easy and it wasn’t supposed to hurt. “That’s the whole problem!”

Draco shook his head, soft and wavering. “That’s not the problem, I promise.”

“Well then what’s the problem?” Harry snarled, prodding his wand towards Draco’s chest, wishing it would be over, that he could go back to bed and sleep and be okay again. That he could undo completely, stay here with the mirage and let that be the only thing left. “I’m sorry I even tried to say goodbye,” he said, turning on his heel to leave.

“Stop!” Draco said, grabbing his arm and holding him fast. “Come with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to show you,” Draco said, tugging him along. He looked up at the canopy, his face screwed up in distress. “We’re leaving!”

The forest seemed to be laughing, something in the nighttime sway of the leaves almost like amusement as the mirage of Draco pulled him somewhere deep within the trees. He thought about pulling away and trying to find his way back alone, but considered that maybe Draco was taking him to their goodbye. He wanted to leave but Draco’s hand felt real as it always had around his forearm and he couldn’t, deluding himself to the last.

“Where are we going?” Harry said, as Draco dragged him tight lipped through the forest, trying to sound like he was in charge of any of this.

“It’s a surprise,” Draco grumbled, his grip too tight as they made their way past the undergrowth.

Draco had only been dragging Harry behind him for about a minute when Harry saw the familiar outline of the castle through the gaps in the trees. “Are you sure you can..?”

“Shut up,” Draco said, sounding like he was on the verge of hyperventilating as he pulled Harry through the edges of the forest and onto the lawn. They broke out of the forest and into the clean night, both of them still as real and solid and they’d been before.

Harry glanced first at the forest and then at Draco, and then at the forest again, trying to calculate what was possible, what the truth was between the boy in front of him and the boy in the forest and the boy who was supposed to be asleep, who was supposed to hate him. He tried to calculate, slowly, muddily like he was rising from the bottom of a very deep and murky pond, how they could all be the same boy.

“But you, don’t you hate me?” Harry asked, his voice sounding stupid and alien even to his own ears.

Draco blinked at him, his lips growing whiter and whiter as he pressed them together, his breath coming fast through his nose. “I _drag_ you out here and the _first thing_ that you say to me-” Here, he took a heaving breath, clenching his hands into fists. “The first thing you say is- Merlin, Potter I try to give you more credit than this!”

“If you would explain it to me then maybe I’d understand!” Harry said, finding he had raised his voice in the chilly moonlight, unwilling to let himself believe, unable to keep himself from hoping.

“I’m real, you idiot!” Draco said, looking as wild as the forest and as strange as the night, everything Harry had hoped and feared of falling from his lips. “I’ve been real the whole time!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Harry asked, wondering how long Draco had been keeping it a secret, wondering what any of it meant, wondering who was hurting who anymore.

“I didn’t know you were real,” Draco said, looking like he might cry or pass out. “I only just found out and I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want you to leave yet and I was just, I was just going to wait for you to forget about it. I knew at the end of school you’d leave and you wouldn’t come back and I thought we could just live our lives, you know? And you’d think you’d just dreamt it up and I wouldn’t tell you and we’d just be able to forget!”

“You could have forgotten?” Harry said, unsure which parts Draco was talking about, why he’d kissed him all those times, why he’d told him all those secrets, why they’d let each other live in a cocoon of lies and hopes.

“I don’t know, maybe,” Draco said, looking heartbroken, looking like he had when he was young. Everything blurred together and they were everywhere they’d gone, they were everything they’d been to each other, they were enemies and lovers and things without names. They were beyond names. They were two boys who wanted to love each other but didn’t know how. “You’re the one who tried to leave.”

“I didn’t want to,” Harry said. “I just thought it was wrong if the real you didn’t want me.”

Draco shook his head, almost smiling almost crying. “You were trying to do what was right,” he said derisively. “And now look at what you’ve done.”

“It’s really you then?” Harry asked tentatively, resisting the urge to look at his feet. He’d wanted to kiss Draco in the forest and it wasn’t going away, wasn’t changing now that he was being given the truth.

“Yeah,” Draco said, uncomfortable in his skin. “Is it really that surprising?”

Harry felt, in an instant, the warmth of Draco’s skin and the way they’d always spoken like their words meant everything, like it wasn’t just a dream. In a way, he didn’t know how he hadn’t suspected, thought maybe he’d worked hard not to see. “No, it’s not.”

Draco nodded, kicking at the dirt by his feet in his expensive shoes, always the hypocrite.

“So what do we do?” Harry asked, staring at him.

“Fuck if I know,” Draco said, kicking harder.

“Stop tearing up the grounds,” Harry said.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Draco snipped, giving the grass one last kick before looking insolently back up at Harry, who had the strange and horrible urge to smile.

“Well what do you want to do?” Harry asked, glancing over at the forest like she might have answers.

“Like, with you? Us?” Draco asked, a blush crawling up from his neck like all the tiny snakes they’d befriended. “I mean, what are my options?”

“What do you want your options to be?” Harry asked evasively instead of ‘just love me’, because everything was too embarrassing and too personal.

“What kind of answer is that?” Draco asked testily, crossing his arms over his chest and shivering in the chilly air. Harry cast a warming charm over both of them, the swirl of it ruffling Draco’s hair. Draco fussed with the few loose strands, looking pensive and perturbed. “That’s how I found out, you know.”

“What?” Harry asked, sticking his wand in his back pocket.

“You have a really distinct magical signature,” Draco said, looking a bit haughty, like he was trying to make up for the pinkness of his cheeks. “It was what made me guess that you were real.”

Harry remembered the night their magic had spilled out of them and intertwined, the sensation of being overwhelmed and tangled up in Draco. The sensation of sinking into the essence of him, of being held so desperately. “Your magic felt so wild I thought you were just an extension of the forest.”

Draco looked surprised, almost flattered. “Thank you.”

“It’s true,” Harry said, smiling tentatively at him. Draco still looked chilled, small in the wintery air and Harry wanted to kiss him again to reassure himself that he wasn’t dreaming, to reassure himself that Draco wanted him like he’d said. “Do you mind if-” Harry trailed off, pulling a hand down his face and squinting at Draco. “I can’t believe you’re real and that you’re still standing here with me.”

“I can’t really believe it either,” Draco said, more softly, like they were pulling themselves back into the softness they’d created with each other. It felt like the moment they’d held hands in the clearing, where the forest had wanted so much for them to kiss.

Draco reached his hand out, slowly like he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. Harry took his hand before he could snatch it back, feeling his skin and the small bones of his fingers, all undeniably real.

“What is everyone else going to think?” Harry asked, squeezing Draco’s hand in his with a disbelieving kind of fervor. “My friends hate you. I mean no offense, but they do. And I think your friends hate me.”

“My friends don’t hate you,” Draco said, and it rang with truth even though they’d have every reason to. He seemed to deliberate on something, his eyes fixating on some far off point. “And Hermione already knows.”

“What?” Harry asked, wondering how there could still be anything that could surprise him.

“She followed you in last night and I told her. We made nice,” Draco said, a little guarded.

“Of course she did,” Harry said, remembering her almost smugness out on the field earlier that day. “And she was okay about it? She wasn’t mad?”

“Just confused, I think.” Draco said. “It doesn’t make sense for you to go for me.”

“Doesn’t make sense for you to go for me,” Harry replied, feeling like an idiot even as the words left his mouth, like even now Draco wouldn’t want him.

“Of course it makes sense,” Draco said, then shut his mouth tight and scowled like he wasn’t interested in saying any more.

“Does it?” Harry asked tentatively, wanting to hear him say it.

“Yes it does,” Draco said, in what would be a cutting voice if he wasn’t clearly trying so hard to protect his heart until the last moment, like he was just as afraid as Harry was. “Everyone likes the hero, and the hero is supposed to get the girl. It’s simple.”

“What’s that other thing though, about everyone always falling for the bad boy?” Harry asked, laughing when Draco rolled his eyes with considerable distaste.

“This isn’t fucking Grease, Potter,” Draco said, startling a grin out of Harry.

“Nice reference,” Harry said, squeezing his hand. “Am I Sandy then?”

“Yes,” Draco said, giving him the beginnings of a teasing smile. Harry gave Draco’s hand a tug, pulling him closer, marveling that he could touch him. Draco let himself be pulled in, suddenly shy as their bodies bumped against each other.

“So are we doing this, then?” Draco asked, their noses brushing as Draco slid an arm around Harry’s waist.

“We can,” Harry said, caught up by the way he had to tilt his head a little bit up to kiss him, the way he smelled herbal and like comfort. “I want to.”

“So do I,” Draco whispered, leaning in to kiss him, more slowly than they had before. It felt the same as it had in the forest but knowing it was real made Harry’s chest constrict even tighter, even more love blooming in his heart like all the tiny mother of pearl flowers he’d seen on the forest floor.

“We should head inside, it’s getting cold,” Harry murmured when they broke apart for breath, their lips numb and the warming charm beginning to dissipate as its caster became too distracted to maintain it.

Draco nodded, a secret smile on his face as he took Harry’s hand and led them back to the castle, finally leaving the forest behind.

In front of them, they had bridges bigger than themselves left to build, holes left to fill and secrets left to tell. They had friends who they knew would laugh and scream when they found out and lives to re-arrange around each other. They had healing to do and love to navigate. They had time to temper their barbs and learn to be better, time to learn to step softly and be careful with each other. They had afternoons in each other’s common rooms with warm tea and homework, evenings in each other’s beds and mornings the same. They had time to become real.

As they passed by the lake on the way back to the castle, it began, quietly, to snow. The forest sighed a deep, contented sigh of relief, and watched them go.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay well ! I hope you enoyed it because it was a lot of fun for me to write. Please leave a comment and kudos if you liked it, they really make my day <3
> 
> http://drarrytrash.tumblr.com/post/130923288919/strangeness-and-charm-45k-nc-17-pairing blah blah here's the tumblr post :)


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